The university cities where landlords are clawing the most profit from students

Every student has a landlord horror story. Landlords are arch-nemeses of the university student community. They paint over mould, cba fixing your oven and claw at your already-slender student loans with their slimy talons, bumping up the rent year on year.

And luckily for landlords, who need as much assistance as they can get during the cost of living crisis, a group called CIA Landlords has published a study to help them locate the best cities for extracting profits from students.

Unsurprisingly London came out on top, with landlords in the city making an eye-watering £2.6bn from students every year. On average, landlords in the capital extract £31.8k in rent from student properties per year.

Oxford and Bristol came next where yearly rent collected on student properties totalled £21.5k and £18.5k respectively.

At the bottom of the pile are Derby (£8.7k), preceded by Durham (£9.4k) and Sheffield (£9.6k).

In the 2022/2023 academic year, the maximum student loan will be £9,706 and £12,667 for London students. That means that in cities like Cambridge, Bristol and Oxford, some students will be forced to spend over 50 per cent of their student loans on rent.

 National Union of Students (NUS) Vice-President Hillary Gyebi-Ababio told The Tab: “The student housing market is scandalous. With the student cost of living crisis biting, we are past the point where students are even close to affording this.

“NUS and Unipol research shows that in 2020/21 accommodation costs had increased by 61 per cent in the last decade before rampant inflation; they also took up almost three quarters of the maximum loan available to students and are considerably more expensive than the average loan.

“It’s disgraceful that so many young people are priced out, either deterred or unable to apply to university, or have their options severely limited by where they can afford to live. If the government and the sector are remotely serious about levelling up, they must urgently introduce rent caps and radically update maintenance support.”

Here are the university cities where landlords are clawing the most profit from students:

Featured image collage of Shutterstock / S Usharani and Unsplash

Related articles recommended by this writer:

• Embarrassingly, the government is investing just £1 per student as part of new mental health support package

• ‘Nothing short of a heist’: University staff to lose up to £200k from their pensions

• Nearly half of all the pingers at UK festivals last year contained no MDMA at all