On Tuesday 5th December, Ronan and I attended The Student Accommodation Conference at the Intercontinental Hotel. The conference had many interesting talks from investors, lenders, operational teams and universities. 

The main message that came through was the strength of the student accommodation sector, and how resilient it has been despite other markets being challenged in recent times. 

The PBSA market in particular is currently seeing changes, as more second year university students are looking to move into purpose built student accommodation rather than privately rented homes. An interesting talk from a university showed that a few years ago universities had to encourage students to go back into PBSA after their first year; now the demand has increased, and the university is running out of rooms within their PBSA as it is such a popular choice. 

For me, the most interesting take of the day was looking at the Building Safety Act and the new building regulations. The message was that we, within the sector, should be viewing the new regulations as an opportunity to get new buildings up to a suitable safety standard, rather than a restriction on what we can build. The speaker pushed for getting buildings up to a standard that not only meets the current regulations but also meets future safety standards that might come in within the next 5 or 10 years. He pushed for this as a real opportunity to improve ESG: a very important and current topic across the real estate sector in general.