StuRents in 2023: Growth and transformation to support your business

2023 has been a transformative year for StuRents, packed with growth, innovation, and learnings. As the year draws to a close, I'm reflecting on some of the company's highlights over the past twelve months. 

Team growth

In 2023, as StuRents celebrated its fifteenth year in business, we continued to expand as a company. As in previous years, we've remained committed to fostering a strong company culture and encouraging employee retention. This is reflected in the fact that our team has grown by more than 30% this year, and we've hired a dedicated Head of People to support this growth. Our Manchester team got a brand new office in August, and our London team is moving into a larger office space at the end of the year! We're continuing our recruitment in 2024 as we look to further expand both our team and the value we can bring our customers. 

Concurrent launch

A particular highlight of 2023 for StuRents has been the launch of Concurrent. We've rebranded and reimagined our Operations offering to reflect the many expansions to our platform's capabilities. Concurrent is built to support your residential as well as student lets, and powers the entire rental journey all the way from tenant acquisition to check-out. We're continually releasing updates and making improvements to bring you the most seamless property management experience possible. Stay tuned for monthly updates via email to see just what Concurrent can do for your property portfolio.

Events and webinars 

We've hosted three successful roundtables this year. These offered the opportunity for groups of sector specialists to network, share ideas, and engage in lively discussions - all over a delicious three-course meal courtesy of the Royal Automobile Club. These intimate events offer our clients and partners the perfect forum for sharing their concerns and questions about property management and the sector more generally. We've had really positive feedback, and so, as we move into 2024, we intend to continue creating this space for insightful and impactful conversations. 

We also launched our StuRents' Quarters webinar series, led by our Head of Research, Richard Ward. Joined by a panel of industry leaders, Richard discussed the latest trends in the student accommodation sector and provided exclusive insights based on proprietary search data from our listings platform, StuRents.com. These events are always recorded, so if you missed our latest instalment, you can catch up here. 

We ended the year with StuRents' Insights: A Year in Review, a webinar to support the release of our 2023 annual report. Richard was joined by our Research analyst, Aisling Murphy, alongside Dr Holly Brown from UCAS, Murdo Mcilhagger from MYS Living, and Philip Gould from Avamore Capital to round up the trends and changes in the UK student accommodation market in 2023 and offer an analysis of what this could mean for industry stakeholders in 2024. The event was a huge success, with interactive polls to engage our audience and a live Q&A with the speakers at the end. If you missed our insights, you can watch the webinar here.

Our Annual Report revealed many crucial insights, including the imbalance between supply and demand in the student accommodation sector, the rise of rents, the accompanying increase in student search budgets, and the changing seasonality of search behaviour. 

In the press

This year, our proprietary data was featured in publications including The Times, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard, Property Week, and Property Reporter - to name just a few. We also received international press coverage from publications such as The Belfast Telegraph, The Irish News, and the Spanish periodical, El Periodico de Catalunya. 

Richard Ward was also invited to speak on the Radio 4 You and Yours segment in November to discuss the reason behind the stark shortage of student accommodation and how, if the issue isn't addressed urgently, the situation will worsen in the coming years.

In December, our Co-founder and Managing Director, Michael Rainsford, also spoke on Radio 4's You and Yours about rising student rents, the current student housing crisis, and how the student accommodation market has changed in the past 15 years since the foundation of StuRents.

Optimising your StuRents city pages for search and discovery

Digital growth and transformation is at the heart of what we do at StuRents, and we've continued to invest in boosting organic website traffic and increasing visibility for the property managers listing with us. To this end, we've published 180 neighbourhood-level landing pages for 30 cities across the UK and Ireland. We now provide hyper-local information to help our student tenants find the perfect property, in the perfect place, and help our property managers reach the most relevant audiences. 

What does 2024 have in store?

As we welcome the new year, we're dedicated to continuing to create property management solutions that support our customers' needs and providing unbiased sector insights that help drive business decisions. 

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the coming months.