Cardiff's student rental market is changing – is your property ready?
With so many Cardiff students coming through our doors each year, we get a clearer view than most of what’s really happening across the student market, from the homes getting snapped up to the ones taking a little longer to let. Nik Lewis, our Director of Operations, shares his take on the current market, what students are looking for, and what landlords should be thinking about as we head into the 2027–28 season.
“Too long, didn’t read”? In short…
We'll soon be advertising student properties for the 2027–2028 academic year, and this year I think there is a wider market conversation worth having with our landlords.
Purpose-built student accommodation, or PBSA, has grown significantly across Cardiff and there is more on the way. At the same time, the price difference between PBSA and the traditional student house or flat isn’t always as great as it once was, which means students have more genuine choice.
That certainly doesn’t mean the traditional student HMO is on its way out. Far from it. A good student house still offers things PBSA simply cannot replicate, and the strongest properties in the right locations continue to have a very compelling offer. What I do think it means is that the market is becoming less forgiving of properties that have stood still while everything around them has moved on.
My advice, therefore, is to look for the small, quick wins, like agreeing a replacement sofa or a coat of paint. Don’t push the asking price too much, and heed advice. It's to understand where your property sits in the market, have a sensible plan for the next few years, and make sure that when students are comparing their options, yours still gives them a good reason to choose it.
Why I'm raising this now
Our busiest period of student lettings traditionally falls between November and February, so we'll soon be reviewing rents, arranging pre-advertising inspections, refreshing marketing material and speaking to landlords about anything that may be worth doing before their property is shown to prospective tenants.
That annual process always involves thinking about the competition. Historically, that largely meant comparing one four-bed house in Cathays with another four-bed house in Cathays, or one student flat with another nearby. Increasingly, I don't think that's enough. We also need to ask: what else could those four students choose for roughly the same money?
That question is becoming more important because Cardiff's student accommodation market has changed considerably over the last decade.
You'd have to be fairly determined not to notice the cranes
Anyone who spends much time in Cardiff will have seen the amount of purpose-built student accommodation that has appeared across the city. We now have large developments offering en-suite bedrooms, studios, gyms, study spaces, communal lounges, roof terraces, cinema rooms and various other amenities that certainly weren't part of the average student accommodation conversation when many of today's landlords were at university.
There is more still being built and planned. Longcross Court on Newport Road is one obvious example currently taking shape, while Cardiff Council has also approved the conversion of Trafalgar House into PBSA. The point isn't really the individual developments, though. It is the cumulative effect of adding hundreds, and ultimately thousands, of additional purpose-built beds into the same market in which traditional student landlords operate.
That wouldn't matter quite so much if Cardiff's student population were expanding at the same pace indefinitely, but there are signs that this can't simply be taken for granted either. Cardiff University's latest financial report recorded 27,225 students in 2024/25 on its reporting basis, down from 27,578 the previous year. The more notable change was amongst overseas students, whose numbers fell from 4,849 to 4,164.
I wouldn't read too much into one year's figures, and Cardiff remains one of the UK's major university cities with a very substantial student population. But it does reinforce the broader point: we shouldn't simply assume that every additional bedroom being built is being matched by an additional student looking for somewhere to live.
The price gap isn't necessarily what landlords remember
For a long time, the decision between PBSA and a traditional student house was fairly straightforward. The purpose-built option might have had the en-suite bathroom, impressive communal areas and smart reception desk, but students generally paid a sizeable premium for it. That gap has narrowed in parts of the market, which is why I think landlords have to be careful not to compare today's rents with their own recollection of what student halls used to cost five or ten years ago.
Students choosing accommodation now are looking at the options in front of them today, and they aren't necessarily comparing like with like. A student might see one room advertised at a lower monthly rent in a traditional house, but then add gas, electricity, water and broadband. Alongside it is a PBSA room at a higher headline rent, but with those things wrapped into one payment, plus an en-suite, Wi-Fi, communal areas and somebody on site if something goes wrong.
It doesn't automatically make the PBSA option better value, but it does make the comparison more complicated than simply asking which bedroom has the cheapest rent.
Convenience is part of what they're selling
This is one area where I think private landlords can sometimes underestimate the appeal.
PBSA operators aren't only selling better furniture or newer kitchens. They're selling convenience. Bills are included, Wi-Fi is ready to go, maintenance is on site, the building is designed around student life and, depending on the scheme, a student may be able to book an individual room without first finding five friends willing to commit to a house together. That removes quite a lot of friction from the process.
It's similar to something we wrote about earlier this year in relation to Cardiff's growing Build to Rent sector. Large developments aimed at professionals are increasingly selling an entire lifestyle and service rather than simply four walls and a front door. Gyms, concierge services, communal workspaces, parcel storage, social areas and on-site management become part of the proposition.
Traditional landlords don't need to replicate all of that, but they do need to understand what tenants are comparing them against. PBSA is effectively the student version of the same trend.
Traditional student houses still have some very big advantages
I don't want this article to read as though PBSA has somehow invented the perfect way for students to live, because it hasn't.
For many students, sharing a house with a group of friends remains a big part of the university experience. They want a proper living room where everyone can pile onto the sofas, a garden, and the feeling that they have their own home rather than a bedroom within a large managed building.
A good traditional HMO can also offer significantly more communal space than a cluster flat, and Cardiff's established student areas bring their own advantages. Being in the middle of Cathays, Heath or Roath means living amongst friends, cafés, pubs, takeaways, shops and established student life. For many groups, that's exactly what they want.
Private landlords therefore shouldn't look at a PBSA development with a gym and conclude that they need to somehow recreate it. The answer isn't to turn a six-bedroom Cathays house into a miniature hotel. It is to understand what that house does well and make sure those strengths are obvious when we market it.
I can also understand why the Council doesn't necessarily dislike PBSA
If I put myself in Cardiff Council's shoes, I can understand why large purpose-built developments have some appeal.
Cardiff has spent years trying to manage the concentration and impact of student HMOs in certain parts of the city. Its planning policies around HMOs are specifically concerned with maintaining balanced communities, while purpose-built developments allow hundreds of students to be accommodated on one managed site rather than spread across dozens of houses on residential streets.
Waste is an obvious example. Large developments have to plan for substantial communal waste and recycling provision as part of the building itself, rather than relying on dozens of individual houses putting bags and bins onto surrounding streets. New student accommodation is also generally excluded from Cardiff's residential parking permit schemes, which limits another potential impact on neighbouring streets.
There is also Cardiff's wider housing shortage to consider. If a growing proportion of students can be housed in purpose-built blocks, I can see why policymakers might hope that over time some traditional houses return to other parts of the housing market, whether that's families, professionals or owner-occupiers.
That isn't me suggesting Cardiff Council has a stated policy of replacing HMOs with PBSA. It doesn't. I'm simply looking at the practical and planning considerations and saying I can understand why large, centrally managed developments may have attractions from a local authority perspective.
I think landlords are better served by understanding those wider forces than pretending they don't exist.
More supply doesn't automatically mean fewer opportunities
The arrival of more competition doesn't mean thousands of Cardiff student landlords are suddenly going to be left with empty houses. Cardiff remains a major student city, students still need somewhere to live, and good properties in the areas they want to be in continue to let.
What I suspect we will increasingly see, however, is a greater separation between the properties that perform particularly well and those that struggle.
A house in a good location, presented well, realistically priced and marketed properly still has very strong appeal. A property that has gradually become tired, while still expecting another automatic rent increase each year, may find the market rather less forgiving.
That isn't fundamentally different from what we're seeing across Cardiff's wider rental market. Earlier this year I wrote about Build to Rent and said that Cardiff remained a strong rental market, but a less forgiving one. Tenants had more options and were comparing properties more carefully, which meant the launch price, condition and presentation mattered more.
I think exactly the same principle is now becoming increasingly relevant in the student market.
The answer isn't automatically to spend money
There will be properties we inspect over the coming weeks where my advice, or the team's advice, will genuinely be to do nothing. The property presents well, students like it, the rent stacks up against the competition and there isn't an obvious reason to spend money.
At another property, £500 or £1,000 spent on decoration, replacing a tired sofa, changing a few pieces of furniture or improving the lighting may make an enormous difference to how it photographs and feels during a viewing.
Some properties may need a more substantial conversation. Perhaps the kitchen or bathroom is approaching the end of its useful life, or the landlord has been considering a wider renovation or a layout change that could potentially add another bedroom.
The important thing is that the decision should be based on the individual property and the likely return, rather than a general feeling that everyone needs to refurbish because some new student blocks have opened.
One of the advantages we have at CPS Homes is the sheer number of student lets we're involved with. We can see in real time which properties generate interest, which prices students accept, where groups hesitate, which homes let immediately and which features genuinely make a difference. That means our advice shouldn't simply be "spend more". Sometimes the best advice we can give a landlord is to keep their money in their pocket.
I like the idea of landlords having a 1, 3 and 8-year plan
Property investment tends to work better when improvements are planned rather than forced upon you.
For student landlords, I think it is useful to look at a property through three different lenses:
- The next year: what small jobs would materially improve the property now? That might be touching up decoration, replacing damaged furniture, improving lighting, tidying the outside space or dealing with something that has gradually started to look tired.
- The next three years: what is likely to reach the end of its life? Perhaps carpets, flooring, mattresses, white goods or a bathroom will need replacing, and you can begin budgeting for that rather than dealing with everything at once.
- The next eight years: what is the bigger plan for the property? Is there likely to be a new kitchen, a major refurbishment, energy-efficiency work, a redesign or perhaps an opportunity to alter the layout and create an additional bedroom, subject of course to the necessary planning and licensing requirements?
Not every property needs an eight-year refurbishment plan written on a whiteboard, but thinking this way prevents a very common problem: looking around one day and suddenly realising that almost everything became dated at the same time.
Presentation matters because students have usually judged the property before they speak to us
Most students' first viewing of your property isn't really a viewing at all. It's on their phone. They have looked at the first photograph, the rent, the bedrooms, the kitchen and perhaps a video before they ever speak to one of our team, and they're then doing exactly what all modern consumers do: flicking backwards and forwards between different options.
That means presentation matters enormously, but presentation doesn't always mean expensive refurbishment. Good photography, a properly prepared property, sensible furniture placement, clean and uncluttered rooms and strong marketing can make a good house look like the good house it actually is.
Conversely, spending £20,000 improving a property and then marketing it with old photographs would rather defeat the point.
That's one of the reasons we're carrying out pre-advertising inspections before the 2027–2028 launch. It gives us a chance to look at each property before it hits the market, talk through anything we're recommending and, equally importantly, tell landlords when we think something isn't necessary.
The rent still has to make sense
Naturally, landlords want the best possible return, and we do too.
If we can achieve another £5 or £10 per tenant per month without harming demand, we will. Across a six or eight-bedroom property, seemingly small increases become meaningful annual sums.
But the highest advertised rent isn't necessarily the highest achieved return. There is a point where trying to squeeze another £10 from each bedroom can cause a good group to choose the house around the corner instead. If that ultimately creates a longer void, or means accepting a reduction several weeks later, the extra rent you were trying to achieve can disappear very quickly.
That's why rent reviews need context. Location, condition, bedroom sizes, the competing houses on that street, PBSA and what happened last year all matter. The job is to understand those things together and establish where the property genuinely sits in the current market.
Another part of this is being prepared to react to what the market tells us. We can make an informed recommendation before launch, but no agent has a crystal ball. If a property is attracting strong enquiries immediately, that tells us something. If comparable homes are letting and ours isn't generating the same response, that tells us something too.
The important thing is not to become anchored to what the property achieved last year, or what we hoped it might achieve this year. In a more competitive market, acting on good evidence after two or three weeks is usually far better than waiting two months and then making the same decision.
The comparison has changed
A few years ago, when assessing a student property, it was reasonable to ask: “how does my six-bedroom house compare with the other six-bedroom houses nearby?”
We still need to ask that, but increasingly we also need to ask: “what else could these six students choose for roughly the same overall cost?”
That might be another HMO. It might be two smaller flats. It might be six rooms in a purpose-built development.
Once you think about the market that way, decisions about rent, presentation and investment become much easier to understand.
So, should student landlords be worried?
No, not “worried”. I’d say “aware”. There's a big difference.
Cardiff's student market isn't disappearing and I don't believe landlords should react to increased competition by panicking, cutting rents unnecessarily or spending thousands of pounds without a clear reason.
What I do think is that owning a student property in the right postcode is less of a guarantee in itself than perhaps it once was. Students have more options, the purpose-built sector has become more sophisticated and the difference in price isn't always enough to make the decision for them.
That puts a greater premium on owning a good property, investing in it sensibly, pricing it correctly and having an agent who understands what's happening across the wider market.
We'll be having those conversations with our landlords as we prepare properties for 2027–2028. Sometimes we'll recommend work; sometimes we'll suggest a longer-term plan; sometimes we'll advise that the rent needs careful thought; and in plenty of cases, we'll tell landlords that their property already compares very well and there is nothing significant they need to do.
The important thing is to understand the competition, make the most of what your property already offers and, where necessary, put a sensible plan in place to make sure it continues to thrive.
Got a question? Happy to help, just pop me a question over at nikki.lewis@cpshomes.co.uk.
For straightforward landlord tips, property updates and practical advice, come and follow me over at The Cardiff Letting Agent on Instagram.
The information contained within this article was correct at the date of publishing and is not guaranteed to remain correct in the present day.
