When managing Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA), delivering a seamless end-to-end student experience is fundamental. From managing your brand online and attracting student prospects to signing the lease and securing deposit payments, a frictionless experience is expected from today’s tech-savvy student audience.
And the expectation doesn’t stop at students.
The PBSA sector is quickly growing, with a supply increase of 71% year-on-year, bringing the UK’s bed count to nearly 700,000. This growth, accompanied by a busy pipeline of 1,544 schemes UK-wide, is set to continue. With portfolios emerging and expanding fast, there is no denying that student housing operators are busy people and require a seamless applicant and booking journey.
End-to-end platforms, such as Yardi’s Student Housing Software, are purposely designed for PBSA to allow operators to manage all aspects of the student journey in one application. You gain access to high visibility across prospect, applicant and student data – including built-in bulk approval tools and mass move-in and move-out functionality.
Your operational teams save valuable time, automate processes, and increase operational efficiency, enabling teams to focus on delivering a valuable student experience.
Seamless Booking Journey
Once a prospective student has landed on your website, the booking journey is one of the first touchpoints. Ensuring your prospects and teams are equipped with the right tools to streamline and simplify the booking journey throughout is vital.
With an end-to-end solution, you can create a website that works instantaneously with real-time availability and pricing on all cluster flats, apartments, studios, twodios and beds will streamline the booking journey from the offset.
A highly configurable, step-by-step digital application form that is integrated directly into your booking engine allows operators to configure weekly or monthly pricing with flexible letting terms based on the demographic in hand. With an integrated solution, student operators can control how and when academic terms are marketed for current and future periods.
From the applicant’s perspective, providing a portal where they can save their application, retain their data and log back in at any time is essential. This provides your applicant(s) freedom to gather additional information and documentation in their own time – operators can also upload and oversee documents to ensure terms or legalities are reviewed throughout the process.
By digitising manual processes, you can save time for both applicants and operators and keep all documentation in one location, ensuring one source of truth.
Enhance Data Capture
Implementing a leasing dashboard that integrates with your website means applicant data is populated automatically, providing a simple holistic view for operators. And the data doesn’t stop at prospective students.
Most applicants will require a guarantor to proceed further with their application. Having an application portal that facilitates this procedure in one place not only increases efficiency for operators but enforces additional security as their personal data is being kept securely in one place.
PBSA management software allows applicants to input guarantor data, followed by an automated email. From here, guarantors receive credentials to access the guarantor portal where they can enter all details, upload documents, sign the lease and make any required payments throughout the tenancy.
What was known to be a complex, time-consuming process, can now be simplified into an applicant-driven, intuitive booking process, that allows operators to nurture applicants and guarantors throughout the application process effortlessly.
Convert Applicants with Ease
By now, you have successfully attracted prospective students, simplified the booking process and streamlined document management. At this point, prospects simply need to review the lease and sign on the dotted line.
Eliminating manual tasks from this process is the favoured option for many operators in the fast-paced student housing sector, with a recent report revealing that e-signatures are 45% faster than manual signatures.
Investing in an end-to-end solution with e-signature tools built-in allows all parties involved to sign with ease without having to log into external platforms or contend with printing and scanning documents.
This enables a quick turnaround in the lease signing process, which is a critical point for saving time.
Simplify Payments with TDS Integration
Before setting up payments for the scheduled rent instalments, students are required to pay a deposit. Ensuring deposit payments are legally protected can be difficult, however, solutions such as Yardi’s have Tenancy Deposit Scheme (TDS) integration built-in to help streamline this process.
Once student applicants have paid their first instalment and deposit, this information is automatically passed on to TDS. Operators then receive a deferment number which is passed on to the students, providing additional security that their payment has been logged successfully.
For payments thereafter, end-to-end solutions such as Yardi’s, provide students with a portal and mobile app to review balance details and set up payment options for a hassle-free rent collection process. This allows students to manage direct debits themselves, providing control and ease of security.
An End-to-End Solution to Bring it all Together
Yardi’s innovative, end-to-end solution for PBSA enhances operations and provides a frictionless experience for students. Operators can showcase communities with dynamic marketing websites, combine student housing and traditional lease options in one leasing dashboard and save time with bulk onboarding for move-ins and move-outs with RentCafe for Student Housing.
See how Yardi’s single, end-to-end solution can help you simplify complex processes, nurture student communities and engagement and easily scales with you as you grow.