Is the PBSA sector having an identity crisis?

In Episode 2 of Season 2 of Housed Sarah, Deenie and Dan share the key takeaways from their recent industry conference visits and discussed some of the other big news in the shared living sector.

This episode covers:
🟣 The Bisnow event takeaways: can the sector overcome affordability issues
🟣 PropTech Connect event: the future of AI in the industry
🟣 Universities in financial difficulty and what that means for the sector
🟣 BTR and the role it is playing as a competitor to PBSA...find out what secret the BTR sector is keeping!
🟣 And should we be changing the language about going to university?

There are some juicy topics discussed in this episode - so definitely one not to be missed.

This episode of Housed is sponsored by Miru Visuals - Specialising in creating stunning property videos that make listings stand out from the crowd and add value to brands. Check them out here: Construction Marketing | Miru Visuals | London

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the second episode of season two of How's the Shared Living podcast. I'm Deanie Lee from the Property Marketing Strategists.

SPEAKER_02: 0:09

I'm Dan Smith from Student Housing Consultancy.

SPEAKER_00: 0:11

And I'm Sarah Kenning from the Property Marketing Strategists.

SPEAKER_01: 0:14

Before we move on with the show we want to say a big thank you to our sponsors for this episode, Miroo Visuals. They are video production with meaning. Sarah and I have been really lucky to have been working with the team at Miroo for a client over the last few weeks and they've been absolutely absolute pleasure to work with and geniuses at capturing some truly special footage that really captures the essence of each building. We often talk about how customer service is hard to capture for a website or social media, but when the Mirror team absolutely nail every brief. They specialise in creating stunning property videos that will make your listings and content stand out from the crowd and add value to your brand. With their expert team, they bring your sites to life, whether you're in student accommodations, sector, residential or commercial. To get more out of your video content and brand, visit mirrorvisuals.com or ask us to introduce you to the team. So a big thank you to everyone at Mirror for sponsoring this episode. Now, on with the show. Dan, Sarah, it's back to... normal life and you've been out and about in events and conferences. So it'd be great to catch up on what you've been doing and where you've been. Sarah, I think you went to the BizNow event. Do you want to give us an overview of how that was?

SPEAKER_00: 1:25

Yeah, so that was the BizNow event focusing on student accommodation. I was invited by the team at Howard Kennedy, so really grateful to them for allowing me to attend because I really do like the BizNow events. This one was in an afternoon. It was a really nice setting. It was really nice timing, a couple of panel discussions, a couple of presentations, and then some networking. So, I mean, I'm not going to lie, it was quite brutal and quite honest, the panel discussions. I didn't really come away feeling very upbeat, if I'm honest about the sector. A lot of it was about affordability, which obviously isn't a very lively, joyful topic when it comes to student accommodation. But what was positive is that there were some, I guess, ideas and positivity, particularly coming from from Rob Waterhouse from GSA, kind of bringing his experience from across the globe at different models. And he was kind of insisting that affordability can be done albeit with the caveat that students have to make compromises for affordability. So Dini, we've uncovered this in our research, but students are prepared to share rooms and they are prepared to share bathrooms if the price and the product is right. And that's really what Rob was reinforcing. They were also talking about whether investors are still interested in PBSA and there was a resounding positivity to it. I think with the challenges around, particularly around the viability of bringing sites to market, around fire safety and ESG and interest rates and everything else that goes with it. I did come away thinking, is this going to stifle innovation? Because surely only kind of experienced big developers are really going to be doing this at this time. You know, is it the time for new, young, small developers to be coming into the market when they've got all of this to you know, to challenge them. And I kind of came away thinking, not sure we're really going to see anything different coming out of the ground because there's too much red tape and there's too many policies and processes that for anyone to deal with, that really only the really big experienced developers can deal with it right now.

SPEAKER_02: 3:38

I think the issue that you've got there, though, is not necessarily that it will stifle new entrants into the market. It will just mean that they focus on the premium sector because that's the only way that the numbers will stack up because of all the new regulations, cost of capital, cost of build, etc. That's why the affordable sector hasn't been stacking up so far. So that's one of the major challenges that the whole sector has. How can you build a room for an affordable price? At the moment, that's incredibly difficult building anything for under a thousand pounds per key is really tricky and that has to change if we are going to move more into the affordable sector. But I heard a lot of good things about that BizNow conference, but I did hear that the outlook wasn't particularly positive from the majority of the panels. I would echo that sentiment as well, probably from PropTech Connect, to be honest, to a certain extent. So while Sarah was at BizNow, I was at PropTech Connect. I was on a panel with Yanis from Vita, Duncan Garoud from Empiric, Pedro from Brookfield, and then it was expertly moderated by Hannah Chapat from Hyber and we were talking all things PBSA best practice in your prop tech but to be honest we covered all kinds of things but primarily that affordability piece and how prop tech can help with that. It was really interesting discussion the day itself is really it's quite interesting but it's lots of different rooms lots of different breakout sessions and it felt not necessarily disjointed but there was so much to take in it was difficult to get to the right session at the right time and as ever these these events are about networking for me so it's good to catch up with some some friends from within the industry but our panel yeah focus on esg and sustainability tech and obviously lots of talk of utopia and then the various different data collection companies as well and software and what to actually do with that data and that's the biggest frustration i think everyone's got it's kind of at the minute it's data collection for the sake of it rather than actually taking action with it on the sustainability front. And then on the PMS, everybody's still focused on what's the silver bullet, which is the magic system that's going to solve all of the problems of reporting to operational room management, to sales and marketing funnels and channel management and finance in particular. God, there's a lot of people struggling with their finance systems and integrating that into a PMS. Do you use the PMS finance system? That's one of the biggest challenges too. And a lot of this just laddered up to the fact that tech is definitely an enabler of affordability long-term, but the initial outlay for some of these things like Ring technology or Amazon have got a product as well that's effectively, they're looking to roll out on a commercial level too that will really enable less staffing on site. Is that what students want and need? Is that how you get into the affordable sector? Is that how you reduce your OPEX to then make your product more affordable? I'm not sure yet. It's definitely something something to to consider but overall good day lots of really interesting people there across btr hospitality pbsa and the various other shared living sectors so yeah definitely one worth going to from a from a prop tech standpoint for sure

SPEAKER_00: 6:49

i'm glad you mentioned sales and marketing in your list of things that prop tech should do in one system because we don't hear that often enough. And it's really good that people are actually considering the end to end process.

SPEAKER_02: 7:02

Well, they really are now that, you know, the attribution modeling for marketing and how you're working out where your leads and your bookings have actually come from. That's always been archaic. It's been so manual and such a frustrating process. And you can't just rely on your Google tags to show you exactly how people are booked now. It's really important that there's that full understanding across the board and that it's its automated attribution as and where you can possibly get it. And from a sales perspective, a bit of talk of AI, which I found really interesting. So I really doubled down on investigating that and looked at what was going on in multiple other sectors there. And there's some really interesting potential there for AI. We could probably cover a whole segment in an episode on AI and what that means for the shared living sectors. But I think from a sales and marketing perspective there, AI has got a lot of potential to help central sales teams in particular. And so, you know, had one conversation there in particular, it was very, very interesting. And I think there's a good way to improve and streamline sales, you know, the central sales system and relieve a bit of the general manager, some of the general managers of some of that sales work too. So yeah, it was good for innovation, that event for sure. And And it's nice to see them not just focusing on your booking engine or your room management, but the full end-to-end system side of things. So well worth going to next year.

SPEAKER_01: 8:30

And Dan, was that one of the things that we always talk about that kind of stifles progression when it comes to prop tech and technology is the fact that there's not the investment there. Did you get a sense that there was more... of those senior leaders in the room that are kind of taking this interest in it? Or was it just talking to technologists?

SPEAKER_02: 8:46

Yeah, so there were a lot of different operators and investors there. Some big PBSA, senior PBSA leadership and BTR as well, both on the investment side, asset management side, and also from operations. So managed to have a good chat with them. And they were there, yes, admittedly looking for the holy grail of that all singing, all dancing system that can do everything and is relatively cheap. Newsflash, that doesn't really exist in that form. But there are certainly some good solutions out there. And I think it was just really an open forum to discuss what the potential innovation could be that's coming down the line, AI being one example, and as much automation as you can possibly get, and personalization too. And just people kind of sussing out certain systems. There was a big exhibition hall upstairs, anything from fire detection systems through to, you know, the usual PMS providers there. And it was, you know, that part was very well organized because there was some really pushy sales people there, I'll tell you that. So I think they're all desperate to get their PropTech out there. It feels like there's nothing groundbreaking apart from in AI that I've seen at PropTech, but it was definitely good to get a bit of a view of what people are looking at in the room, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 9:59

Yeah, that's great. Great. And it's great that there's that time between affordability and prop tech, because we've got to look at all areas that we can improve that affordability across all shared living, not just PBSA. So thanks for that, guys. It's good to be back out there, I'm sure. And I know that there's, well, conference season is fast abounding. So I'm sure we'll be giving updates on many of the conferences that we'll be attending over the next few weeks and months. Just to get on with more information I think not to follow your kind of overview of that things aren't looking great, Sarah, when you went to business now, but there's been a lot of press about universities being in financial difficulty over the last few weeks, months, maybe years. What does that mean for accommodation and PBSA? What does that mean for recruitment? Are we going to see universities merge? Are we going to see bankruptcy? Or is it just going to mean that students and parents have got to pay more? There is a lot of doom and gloom going around about university, but is it still the attractive option for domestic students What are we hearing? What are we seeing? What do we think?

SPEAKER_00: 11:06

What's interesting is my stepdaughter is doing the open day rounds at the moment for universities. And there is a university that has had quite well publicised sort of financial difficulties and redundancies that she attended over the weekend. And they actually faced it head on in the kind of the introduction chat and reassuring students that, you know, all of the well attended courses they've got, you know, there'll be no challenge with whatsoever the one that she's looking to do is is award-winning that sounds like there's no danger of them going under so it's interesting actually that they're kind of pre-empting that people will be looking into this and you know being influenced potentially about not going to universities in the future because of financial difficulty which will just exacerbate the the problem if you know and people will then start choosing the universities that were doing well in the first place so i just thought that was an interesting observation

SPEAKER_02: 12:01

that's good news but the more transparency that we can get from universities the better because we have had and we still get very little and i would want that addressing straight away if i was going to university i would want to know that university was going to be there in five ten years when i finished my course and when i'm you know then moving on to my next job my second job my third job and there is a danger that some of these universities may not be there i'm definitely not going to name names but i i'm reading a lot about what the government might do and i think you know we can analyze why you Universities are in dire straits until the cows come home. But I think what they're going to do next is absolutely key. Very, very difficult for them to say, hey, we're going to support the entire sector financially from a government perspective and effectively step in there. I think they're more likely to increase tuition fees, talk of that going to£12,500. But they would have to do that alongside some very, very flexible student loan terms and probably nationalise the student loans company and I just can't see that they would be able to do that any other way it'll be incredibly unpopular right now but the first thing that they've tried to say to universities is do not expect a bailout you have to manage this on your own get your house in order and that means get rid of the courses that are spurious or that have attracted the wrong types of students or have high cancellations or failure rates and try and make sure that your structure is lean as and where possible the elephant in the room there is pensions me saying that is going to be incredibly unpopular to any university client that I've got, and I have several, but the pensions are just, they are pretty damn good. When you look at the grand scheme of things and everyone else's pensions, they're pretty high. It's not surprising that there are so many people that, you know, stay working in universities for life, life academics, et cetera, that then rise through the rank. That will definitely need addressing. You cannot just simply prop up a pension system And, you know, not then address the rest of the challenges that go with it. And I think that that's definitely something that's not being talked about enough. People are scared of talking about it because universities, of course, very unionized and they're certainly capable of striking. We've seen that before. Students are also capable of striking. So there could be a bit of a year of discontent depending on what happens. But I think for now, universities being told to get their houses in order, that is one thing, streamlining and getting rid of a few members of staff, making a few voluntary redundancies as and where possible is another thing completely addressing, firstly, the pension deficits that a lot of universities will have. But secondly, how you address that Pension crisis in universities moving forward. Can you really afford to pay the amount that you are moving forward? And is that really sustainable on an ongoing basis? I've read up a lot on it. I've spoken to quite a few people on it. Yes, of course, it's great to be in a university with a nice pension, but at what expenses is that? How much is that costing students effectively? So lots to look at, lots to run at. My thoughts is that I think Probably the government will continue along those lines. They may do something on the tuition fees at some point next year, but I think there's a chance that they might let one or two smaller universities merge with others as well and effectively step in and say, you're in trouble. You need to merge with another university sharpish or we will let you go to the wall. So it may be more enforced mergers rather than letting a university go into administration or liquidation. But who knows? Genuinely, who knows? I'd love to be a fly on the wall in some of those meetings right now because we know that those meetings are happening. But yeah, very concerning. But equally, there's institutions out there where you can just see that their accounts are absolutely flying. And some of those, you can actually see they don't have to drop their grade boundaries in clearing. So their financial health is very good. They don't need to worry about taking... international students or you know bolstering their numbers during clearing and I think that's something to to watch out for and more students will start to look at that and ask those questions.

SPEAKER_01: 16:18

But is it still as attractive domestic students to go when there's so many other alternative options out there and I think we've spoken about this in the past maybe not on air maybe off air you know you can go and study in loads of different ways you don't even have to go and get a degree you know you can obviously do an apprenticeship degree but there's loads of online courses which is obviously going to impact the postgraduate market and there is just a real risk that it's not the thing that it was or seen as a thing as it was as it was for generations previous.

SPEAKER_02: 16:46

I think from an academic point of view it's still incredibly useful don't get me wrong I think you can condense a lot of it into two years and I know that's something that was mooted by by one of the political parties in in their manifesto But I worry about the value. For me, university was partly about the academic qualification that I would get at the end of it. But a lot of it was about that life experience. Now, I was in halls. I was pre-tuition fees. And that means that I feel like I got good value. Still had a student loan. But I feel like I got good value. Would I feel like that right now when I'm paying£350 a week to go to university or to stay in university accommodation in Bristol, for example? I don't think I would. I think the student accommodation has reached a tipping point in affordability where students are definitely starting to question the value of university. And I don't think it's based on the academics or the fact that, hey, I could just get an apprenticeship or whatever. I think it's cost-based. I think this is, do I really need to saddle myself with so much debt and pay so much money to live when I could either do an apprenticeship or, you know, stay at home or whatever else it might be.

SPEAKER_00: 17:57

So, yeah, it's interesting that you use the word debt, Dan, because Martin Lewis, I saw he was on this morning. I don't watch this morning to caveat that. I saw it reposted on Instagram. That's far better than watching this morning, obviously. And he basically said that we should stop talking about student debt or tuition debt or anything because he said it's a tax. He said, you know, in other countries, people just call it their university tax, which is 9%. you know, it's a proportion of your salary. And he said that, you know, it's very negative. And he said that he would, you know, it costs a lot of money to go to university. He would hate the word debt and, you know, to put people off going to university because he just said it's just another tax. You know, and if people start thinking like that, you know, people don't decide not to work because they're going to get taxed on their salary. So people shouldn't think about that. And I just think that actually, is there a big, huge PR piece, actually, that I don't know who, you know, universities individually, but potentially collectively need to come together to start actually talking about the positives of university. So one thing, for example, I was talking about is with my teacher friends is, as you just mentioned, you know, pensions are pretty good when you're a you're a teacher. But I don't see that that's what's enticing people to go into teaching. So actually, you know, if you're trying to recruit people into teaching courses, for me, one of the key selling points would be if you go into teaching, you know, you'll get an amazing pension at the end of it. So it's those kind of things that actually these hidden things that maybe people have got a little bit lazy about marketing university because people have just always gone it's just been you know the natural order of things that actually just maybe everyone needs to try a little bit harder and I guess recategorize we you know change the language

SPEAKER_01: 19:41

I was just going to agree with you Sarah because I just think that when you were talking down about kind of the reasons that you went and the value you got from it and I think the bit that is being lost or has been lost probably with the the tuition fee being implemented is that the big part of going to university is that step of growing up that kind of going out of where your local community is meeting people of all walks of life which really makes you who you are and sets you up for going into the world of work because that's what the world of work is like and you don't have to just do it by degree avenue there's lots of different ways you can do it but It just feels that actually we're batting it down so much that it's just becoming about get a degree and move on. But there's much more value to that process and that experience that is getting slightly lost that we do need to make sure that this generation feel actually that they can access that and they can have that and not not completely price them out of it. Yeah, just that there is so much more that that opportunity can deliver.

SPEAKER_02: 20:39

Oh, without a doubt. But that experience is getting lost in lack of affordability. And you look at the satisfaction ratings. I talk about this almost every episode. You look at the fact that in the affordable sector, the students living in accommodation there, they are very happy. In the premium sector, they're happy. There is a massive value gap in the middle there. So that's a lot of students there that don't feel like they're getting good value for money for from their accommodation or from their university experience. And that is the concern that I have. I think that everybody has a bit of work to do on that. And, you know, I've made myself clear to all of my clients. And I think on here that there needs to be a bit of a recalibration of pricing in some locations, definitely not all locations, definitely not for all asset, but we need to be much more realistic about not necessarily following the benchmark of Unite or Empiric who are happy to announce that, you know, they're 700 and a half or 10% year on year increase, because I don't think that's feasible for every operator and every property to be able to meet that. We need to be definitely reasonable about what that's going to look like and how we can make university affordable. That's not just our jobs. Our jobs are also to make returns for investors, of course. But we do need to start thinking more about, you know, are we offering value, not just in the affordable sector? Is this offering value? Is someone going to look at this in 10 years time and say, yeah, glad I went to uni, had a brilliant time, lived in a great place and was really well looked after? Or are they going to say, couldn't afford to do anything, live somewhere really expensive. I'm going to be paying it off for the rest of my life. And I think the issue with saying that it's a tax, unfortunately, the university is a creditor. And so is your accommodation. The student loans company, it all just ends up, you do owe someone money. So it's not necessarily a tax, you've built up a debt there. But I appreciate that there are different ways that you could probably sell that in. And it may be that we need to do some work on the language. I think that there should be a full root and branch reform of obviously maintenance loans, but just student loans in general. And that may involve some kind of nationalisation, God knows what that would look like or when that might be. But yeah, there's still a lot of work to do there for sure, not just on the spin, but on actually the nuts and bolts of what university is all about.

SPEAKER_01: 23:01

And I think it's everyone's responsibility. Like you say, Dan, we've got the responsibility to get returns for investors, but if there's no students going, you can't get those returns. So we all have that responsibility to make it right. But I'm sure we'll come back to this. There's You know, there's a lot to be done. You know, we all want it done quickly. It possibly won't be done quickly, but I'm sure we'll have this conversation again and we will watch this space. We just wanted to have a chat now about build to rent. We touched on this on last week's episode. I know, Dan, you've shared some views on LinkedIn. What is going on in the BTR space? Who's living in those BTR spaces and what impact is that having?

SPEAKER_02: 23:41

This was in response to a market report that I did in Leeds. And I was drafted in by a couple of investors to have a look at properties in Leeds to understand what was going on in the market, where were the students, where were they likely to be next year, what about rent setting, and really understand why there was a supposed shortfall in Leeds. Now, I think there are so many different parts at play. I counted and I explored 10 elements to why Leeds has really struggled as a market this year. You could take Leeds and you could say Nottingham Bristol, Southampton, Glasgow, Edinburgh. And yes, I know I've said Glasgow. Yes, there are some assets really struggling in Glasgow, believe it or not. And some of this definitely comes down to BTR and the role that Build to Rent is playing as a competitor to PBSA. Now, I understand why some students are preferring to go to BTR. It's typically the room sizes are slightly bigger. There's normally one to three bed apartments and the studios are a good size. Some BTR has similar facilities and amenities to PBSA. And I think quite often they're seen as somewhere perfect for postgrads where they can relax and work and it's quiet. There's no undergrads there typically. And the thing that has surprised everybody in Leeds is quite how many students are living in BTR. And it's not something that I think the sales agents in particular and anyone doing feasibility studies, unless they've come to me, has really understood. Because BTR is taking a significant chunk of students, in particular international students, in particular Chinese students. And so everybody has asked me this year, where are the Chinese students? And in Leeds in particular, a lot of them are in BTR. Now, BTA, I want to keep that as a bit of a secret from what I can tell, because I think there's a real focus on BTA standing on its own two feet rather than being, you know, effectively a version of PBSA. Now, there are some that have caps. Some BTA properties have caps that are mandated through planning that they cannot have more than X number of or X percentage of students in their property. And there are some that have self-imposed caps. Now, when I put this on LinkedIn, it was picked up by a high-profile development director of one of the top BTR investors and operators who said, our cap is 10%. And that's great. They have a self-imposed cap of 10%. I wonder if that cap is still in place in assets where they're maybe under-occupied or mobilizing. And I know for a fact that not everybody has such stringent caps in place. But let's be clear, in Leeds, even if it was a 10% cap in all BTR properties, there's a pipeline of 10,000 BTR beds. That's 1,000 students living in BTR that should have been or could have been. And actually, yeah, let me be really clear on the messaging here. I'm not saying that students shouldn't live in BTR. I think that PBSA operators and investors think that they should be living in PBSA. And the BTR developments have proved popular for good reason. And it's something that PBSA really needs to have a look at. But I think that there are a significant proportion of international students living in BTR, in Leeds in particular, but you could, as I said, swap out Leeds for Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and various other places where BTR, Bristol as well, BTR pipeline is strong almost everywhere now. It's increasing. And I would say that on average from every BTR operator that are, or co-living as well, operator that I've spoken to, it's around the sort of 30% mark in terms of the number of international students. Flex that up and down because I've heard 70% and I've done various different work with different clients as well that have higher proportions and obviously right the way down to 10% of a cohort being international students or just students in general so it's something that PBSA developers and investors need to consider when you're doing your competitor analysis have a look at BTR when you're doing your feasibility studies have a look at BTR and just a portion, a percentage of students of that total population that is eligible to live either in BTR or PBSA, not just the total number of students. Again, please stop being lazy with your student to bed ratios, but it's definitely worth considering BTR. And I do think PBSA, there are some questions to be asked about why students are choosing BTR over PBSA. And they're starting to be addressed by the likes of Vita who are launching effectively a co-living BTR model, Downing have done the same thing, Unite are moving into BTR. We are moving into an era of blended living. And I think that that is going to be a little bit confusing for planning applications, for local councils, local authorities, for universities as well to fully understand, do we nominate with BTR or PBSA or how does this work? And it also will go a long way to explaining why in a city like Leeds where the PBSA pipeline is 10,000 and the BTR pipeline is 10,000, why anything up to maybe 4,000 of those potential students will be living in BTR rather than PBSA. Loads to run out there. Not all going to be popular, what I've just said there. And I know that not all BTR operators have high caps or just let anyone live there. I know there are some operators and investors and developers with stringent caps, but still, even if your cap's 10%, That is a big impact. So just something to think about for PBSA in particular.

SPEAKER_00: 29:32

We actually asked the question about what is so appealing about BTR to the team at Viva City. And obviously they run WeChat mini programs on behalf of PBSA, but they also have BTR and co-living clients as well. So they said, which I don't believe is any different to any other member of the public when looking for somewhere to live i don't think that these responses are specific to students is spacious flats their flats are the room spaces are larger but the flat sizes are smaller private appliances they like to have their own washing machine and they like you know large fridges and you know big fancy appliances pet friendly which is really, really interesting. Flexible tenancies as well. So I know that you were talking about postgraduates, but if you're eligible to stay longer, you can in BTR. You don't have to move out at the end of your degree. But also, if you only want to be there for six months, you can be there for six months.

SPEAKER_02: 30:28

You can and you can't. I mean, that was something that I mentioned, the fact that you can have flexible tenancy lengths. And There's a certain amount of properties that will have flexible tenancies. I would say it's actually the minority. Most of them are minimum 12 months. And I think that it will just be in mobilization or in those cities where the occupancy is struggling. They'll just take anyone and everyone, at which point BTR becomes probably a little bit more co-living. But everything you're saying was corroborated correctly. by my visits in Leeds. You know, more space, their own appliances, etc. Yeah, I've been told that Chinese students are actually cancelling in certain assets because there's a property next door in the sort of, let's call it the student ghetto area near the Marion Centre in Leeds, where, yeah, there are washing machines and dishwashers in each flat and things like that. And that makes a big difference to them. So, yeah, it's really interesting that.

SPEAKER_00: 31:23

Last thing on the list was outdoor space as well. So balconies, as well as outdoor space and you know we know that you're never going to see a balcony in a purpose-built student accommodation you know and that institutional feel I think is what I've read into this really is what they're looking for elsewhere really it might be that they've had enough of student university type accommodation in their first year And actually, as they get older, they are looking for a more evolved, mature product and BTR works for them. Sorry, Deanie.

SPEAKER_01: 31:57

We have a bit of a kind of crisis in PBSA about what we actually are, because when you've got 52 week contracts, it's not making that difference that actually this is for students. Yes, granted, some students need to be there for 52 weeks, but some don't. And we talk about that. product and you know I've never liked the institutionalized kind of feel that you get in some of these properties especially those en suite flats with those long corridors is that when the price is not that different why wouldn't you go to a flat where you've got your own communal entrance? You've got a nice little hallway that feels like a hallway. It doesn't feel like a corridor. You can live with your mates and it feels like you've grown up and you've matured and you're there and you've kind of got all the same benefits that you've got in PBSA. And really kind of, I guess, PBSA might be losing its way in terms of its identity. And that's where we need to get it back is that if this is for students, make it for student and sell those benefits.

SPEAKER_02: 32:52

Totally agree. I was touring around Simmons House in Leeds, which is a prestige student living asset. Very, very impressive. But they have changed the model of how they would ultimately have their own suites laid out. No big corridors. You've got your living room and then you've got four rooms off of that. And that made a real difference. And I, you know, I videoed it, took loads of pictures because it wasn't something that I'd seen a huge amount of. We're used to seeing, you in a long corridor ensuite apartment and your kitchen at the end or whatever. And this felt much more akin to BTR. But obviously, the planning permission states must be students. So BTR has kind of stolen a march there. I don't think that local authorities have got control over what btr really is at the moment i don't think there's a real understanding of the nature of the or the demographics of the cohort and that is a bit of a problem for pbsa in particular where btr can take pretty much anyone and everyone that they'd like and that's definitely something that we need to be mindful of and i don't know whether there'll be some change in that or if they'll if they'll look to retroactively change it but i think that there will be more focus from planning regimes and local authorities on you know those caps within btr what that looks like who it should apply to and you know how many students actually should be living in your btr property but there is a reason it's so popular and and i think pbsa needs to be mindful of that. We need to learn from it. I think some operators already are, some developers and investors already are. We've talked about Vita and Unite and various others moving into co-living and BTR as well. So yeah, lots to run out there, but I think some food for thought for PBSA for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 34:44

It's a good conversation. We're going to have to wind it up now because we're out of time. But again, one that we'll come back to and one I think that is really super important. But thanks so much for listening today. It It's good to be back on episode two of series two. A big thank you once again to our sponsor, Miro. Getting video content that goes beyond the ordinary and really captures people and brand is quite an art. So we do urge you to consider your video strategy and get in contact with Miro Visuals. If you'd like to sponsor Housed, we have slots available for season two, so do get in touch. We'll be back next week for some more news and insight. Please subscribe and share.