Students have traditionally provided a steady supply of tenants for landlords, and in these hard times it appears that this strong bond is only set to strengthen further.
Landlord Assist has released figures this week that show that students are helping a lot of landlords to beat the recession.
They have shared with us the fact that the latest figures from the UK University & Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) showed an 8 percent increase in the number of people applying for higher education.
This is excellent news for those landlords with properties near places of higher education. Graham Kinnear, MD at Landlord Assist, said: “Very few students are able to afford mortgages, so there remains plenty of scope in the student market, particularly in so-called university towns. The market tends to be predictable and reliable as students tend to stay in a property for at least a year at a time.
He also points out that at the end of their studies students are most likely to want to return to the places they are from and so, therefore, unlikely to cause any problems by refusing to vacate the property. In many ways they can be the perfect tenants.
A word of warning, though. Students do tend to cause a higher than average amount of wear and tear and that will need to be corrected by the start of the following academic year.