Find out why a new era in student housing could be taking shape

Investment Opportunities in European Student Housing

In the recent paper Global Living Reimagined, Hines Research identified a specific opportunity emerging in the student housing market in Europe. Indeed, growth in the European privately developed, owned, and managed student housing sector (also known as Purpose-Built Student Accommodation or PBSA) over the last decade has been notable, expanding from 1.9% of total European investment activity in 2019 to 5.3% as of Q3 2024.¹

Hines Research has identified three key factors that are driving pockets of opportunity in the sector:

• Dual drivers of demand: There’s been an uptick in both domestic and international students.
• University quality matters: To find the most compelling opportunities, one must follow the students, and there is a clear concentration of overall enrollment growth and growth in international students at the most competitive universities.
• PBSAs outperform, and there’s not enough of them: Recent growth has been healthy for PBSA. There’s also clear evidence that privately managed student housing properties in catchment areas around universities with higher proportions of international students generate rent premiums over not only the broader metro average for student housing, but also relative to student accommodation run by universities. At the same time, constraints on local rental supply mean that many schools have a low ratio of PBSA to overall student accommodation stock. This doesn’t look to improve over the mid-term, as most construction pipelines have been thin.