Something struck me as quite interesting the other day. A few weeks ago the union held a housing talk which said if you went outside of the student areas you could get even cheaper housing of like £40 a week which I presumed would be just as low standard as typical student housing. But there is a much bigger difference.
Take this for an example. The houses my friends live in go for between like £48 and £60 a week and are student houses. That means they suck. Don’t get me wrong, you get some quite nice student houses in comparission to others. But I have yet to see a “nice” student house. IE, a house that as a non-student you would think, yeah this is quite a nice house. In terms of student houses there are different standards but compared to other houses they are very low standard housing. All of them.
Secondly they are in really bad areas. Hyde Park, Woodhouse and Headingley are some of the most burgled areas in the entire country not to mention the string of friends I could reel off that have been mugged. And the area itself is just a horrible area I mean you have Woodhouse Moor but generally they are dingly streets filled with terrace housing and very little greenary.
Ok so let’s say that is like £55 a week plus add on another £20 for all your utility bills (water, gas, electricity, phone, internet, TV, etc) that comes to a total of £75 a week.
Ok now imagine this. 3 bedroom semi-detached house to share. It’s nicely furnished in terms of the standards of a a real house - ie, nice enough that it would meet up to the standards that your parents would live in. Kitchen, dining room, lounge, bit of a garden, nice big drive enough to fit about 6 small cars onto. Nice area too both in terms of aesthetics with plenty of green and indeed a lake literally over the road from you and in terms of crime, or the lack of it.
So you basically have a nice house, in a nice area, without the crime you get in student areas. How much would you pay for that? Presumably a lot more than the crappy student house in the crappy student area right?
How does £25 sound? All bills inclusive. I kid you not. (Disclaimer: this figure comes from a real offer made to me. But a damn good one. I’m not saying they are all quite this good but my point still stands). It’s like, well in this example it is exactly, one third of the price of a student house. And about a million times nicer. The only thing you don’t have is location (in terms of student housing being near town and uni). Other than that it’s a no-brainer. Seriously think about that. Your paying three times as much for a house of no where near as good quality in no where near as nice an area, so you can get around a little easier. We’re getting raped.
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December 29th, 2006 at 9:57 am
This is always the way though, with property location is the most important factor when buying and selling houses. If I had a shoe box in the right part of London I could sell it for an astronomical amount of money. In some places in the UK I’d be better off burning the deeds and pretending I never owned it simply because its worth nothing to sell and the council tax is costing too much.
Its not really surprising that the same thing applies to student housing - just look at where you’re living now. Even with the nice room and the food etc. you are most certainly paying to be actually on the campus.
It all boils down to market forces and what people are willing to pay to be living where they want to live.