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The UK student housing sector is moving towards a multi-family approach along the lines of the US, according to JLL’s director of student housing and higher education Philip Hillman.

‘While we’ve spent much time arguing that student housing is an asset class in its own right, what the student housing deals of recent weeks demonstrate is a move towards a multi-family approach in the UK. These investors want to do private rental sector (PRS), they want to do student housing,’ he told PropertyEU’s student housing briefing at Mipim in Cannes.

Multi-family is the largest institutional asset class for pension funds in the US, he noted. ‘The Americans laugh at us when we say the UK market is more mature than in Europe, they think our market is still very immature. We still don’t have a big multi-family portfolio offering for investors.’

Referring to CPPIB’s takeover of Liberty Living for £1.1 bn (€1.5 bn) and the sale of the Carlyle Pure Student portfolio in Central London to Russia’s LetterOne for £532 mln (€732 mln), Hillman said there had been more deals in the UK in the last two weeks of February than over the whole of 2014.

‘There were £2 bn of transactions in the UK in 2014. We’ve seen £2.5 bn of transactions so far this year and another £1.5 bn is under offer or pending so we’re going to see at least £3.5 – 4 bn of transactions this year.’

The CPPIB and LetterOne deals underscore the strong international investor interest in the sector which has come a long way in the past two decades, said Hillman, who has been involved in the UK student housing market for the past 25 years.

‘We’ve seen the sector grow from almost nothing to a major global asset class. Some 80% of the investment in UK student housing has come from overseas. We’ve seen a lot of investment from North America, with the likes of Goldman Sachs and Canadian pension fund PSP investing heavily and working with Greystar. We’ve seen investment by Russian money, in the guise of LetterOne. And we’ve seen investment from Gulf investors so it really underscores how global the market is. I think we’re going to see continued diversification as we move on.’