Unite Group has filed proposals to redevelop a student accommodation site in Bristol, buoyed by advice from Knight Frank that the supply-demand imbalance in the city is set to worsen.
The company’s Waverley House development on Crow Lane in the city centre has 217 student rooms, converted from office space in the 1990s.
The site comprises a six-storey, vacant car park straddled by a 16-storey tower. It is close to Unite’s 234-bed Favell House and the 115-bed Rackhay, with which it shares reception facilities.
Unite now wants to demolish the building and car park and build a new 18-storey tower with 507 student beds alongside community and commercial space. Alec French Architects has designed the proposed building, describing the existing site as “a negative, largely inactive, uninteresting, unattractive and overly defensive frontage… within the local townscape”.
A planning statement from ROK Planning said: “The proposed development seeks to regenerate the existing site in order to create a higher quality mixed-use development, which providers a greater and improved offering of PBSA, greater amenity space for residents, enhanced public realm and landscaping, new commercial and/or community space and a building of higher architectural quality.”
A report on student accommodation demand in Bristol from Knight Frank, lodged with the planning application, said the number of students at the University of Bristol has risen by more than a third between the 2016-2017 and 2021-2022 academic years. At the University of the West of England, the figure has risen by 40%.
The agency said the city has 43 university operated PBSA schemes with 15,792 beds, and 41 privately operated schemes with 6,982 beds.
“Within half a mile of Waverley House, 3,857 beds have been developed since 2014 – meaning that 47.4% of the bed spaces have been delivered in the last 10 years,” Knight Frank added. “Over the last five years, just 1,212 bed spaces have been added in the catchment. Delivery of student beds over this period has fallen considerably short of the growth in full-time students (+2,445 students) living within the catchment over the same period.”
Citing EG Radius planning data, Knight Frank said there are eight schemes in Bristol under construction, providing 3,921 new bed spaces; 10 with planning consent but which are not yet under construction, which would add a further 5,309 beds; and 5,489 bed spaces across 15 schemes pending approval.
“It is highly unlikely that supply will keep pace with demand considering the expected growth in student numbers in the area and wider again in the UK market as a whole,” the agency said. “The imbalance between student demand and housing supply is therefore expected to increase and as a result will continue to place more unwanted pressure on the local private rented market.”
Image © Phil Bird/imageBROKER/Shutterstock
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