Following the rush of university clearing, students often struggle to find and book private accommodation. University-owned accommodation is particularly scarce at this time of year, forcing thousands of new students to make alternative arrangements and find privately-run accommodation to live in.


Last year, students who successfully found a university placement through clearing hit record levels of 64,900 applicants, and is predicted to be a similar number of students this year. With a great influx of new university placements, comes an increased demand for student accommodation. University accommodation is particularly limited at this time of the year, and whilst some rooms are reserved for students finding a place through clearing, many will be forced to live in privately owned accommodation with strangers.


Danielle Cullen, Managing Director at StudentTenant.com comments, “Once university students have successfully secured a place at university, they must prioritise securing accommodation as a matter of urgency.


Every year we experience a surge in demand for student properties in August, as thousands of students from clearing opt to use our service to secure accommodation for the year. Fortunately, there are still options when it comes to privately-owned accommodation, but it’s not always an easy ride for individual students.


A difficulty students are often faced with when booking privately rented houses is the ability to book individual rooms, as many landlords prefer group bookings over individual room bookings. It’s a huge problem for new students heading to university. It’s likely they won’t know anyone at the university they have secured a place at, and can often struggle to find the right people to live with when attempting to form a group with strangers.


Students have never had an easy way to group together, and are usually left to use social networking sites to try and find housemates in a plethora of panic and madness. Until now.”


Find a housemate tool

StudentTenant.com have created the ultimate solution. A powerful and innovative new tool which is the first of it’s kind. The new “Find a Housemate” feature on the StudentTenant.com website aims to completely end the worry of desperately searching for the right people to live with, not just during clearing, but all year round.


The new “Find a housemate” tool, released today, automatically matches students together based on their preferences, similar to a dating app. This is based on their university and location, interests, values, and the type of housemate they would like to live with.


Each matched user is rated by a percentage match, and the more matching answers the two users have, the higher percentage match. If students would like to browse other users on the platform, they can use the filter function to look through and find anyone they think would be the perfect property partner.  


Once students have been matched, they are free to directly message each other on the platform, and organise booking a property.


Danielle continues, “Every year we are faced with so many individual students struggling to find somewhere to live, as landlords just refuse to accept them. There’s currently no other tool like this on the market, so we wanted to create something to really streamline the process - particularly during such stressful times like clearing. Often students have no idea where to start, so we tried to make it as simple as possible.”