Every year there is an influx of students that hate renting, and I was one of them.
Students should be excited about moving out and being independent for the first time. Instead, they waste valuable time that could be spent studying or having fun locked in battles with landlords and letting agencies or trawling through disappointing properties.
Every year this cycle repeats. And frankly, it doesn’t work for anyone and has created a toxic market where students don’t trust landlords and landlords don’t trust students. It is a relationship set up to fail.
If we break it down, young people mostly live at home and are spoon-fed throughout their time at school. Most students are given no practical life lessons at school, but you are expected to thrive as you’re shoved into university, living on your own and fending for yourself for the first time.
Hence, for students, there is a lot of anxiety over finding the right accommodation, the right housemates, understanding contracts and being taken advantage of by people with the wrong intentions. At the same time, landlords often have an agent acting on their behalf to help them with one-off services. This means it can feel as if it’s a letting agent, the landlord and their legal team vs. a student.
There’s an imbalance of power. As a result of this anxiety, the pressure of university and the horror stories around renting, students can be ‘keyboard warriors’ to landlords.
In turn, it makes the landlord or agent less keen on going out of their way to help the student and starts the relationship off on the wrong note at the start of term.
This is the key problem that HYBR tackles. We are a student accommodation platform that supports first-time renters. We are the only platform focused exclusively on the student tenant, building a digital community of students who can access support and everything they need to rent as a student in one place. By building a strong brand and helping students become better tenants, we help landlords rent their properties faster and take the stress out of renting to students.
At the end of the day, students are the landlords’ clients, so it is in their best interest to ensure that the student is happy and that they want to treat the property with respect. Both sides need to meet in the middle.
At HYBR, we ensure that there is a clear understanding of who is responsible for what at the start of tenancy and that students get their hands held and are educated on their obligations as a tenant. And it is vital that landlords are good at communicating - that they keep their tenants up to date with maintenance requests.
We’re scaling into all the major cities in the UK to help thousands more students and to change the negative narrative around landlord, agent and student relationships for the good. Our aim is to make it easy to rent to students, encourage all property owners to open their doors to students to ensure that students can always find great homes to live in all year round.
* Hannah Chappatte is founder of new online lettings platform HYBR *
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