The kind of student housing we're all keen to avoid. Image: Alex Cockroach/Flickr
I thought I must be dreaming when a man was floating outside my bedroom window at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. We made eye contact through the gap in my blind, but I sleepily dismissed this as part of my dream and went back to sleep.
On opening the blind at a more reasonable hour, sometime in the afternoon, I saw a big ‘TO LET’ sign on the side of the house. I should have been more worried about the eye contact I’d had earlier with the man, but instead I was more outraged by the fact that we have been living in our new house in Crookesmoor for 42 days, and already we are being pushed to move out.
We had received a letter telling us that if we didn’t sign up to another year on the tenancy agreement, viewings of our house would commence on November 1. Once we had replied stating that we won’t be staying on, the ‘TO LET’ sign was put up and listings of other houses available with our letting agency came through the door.
It is the first year students I feel the accommodation rush affects the most. They have only known the people they are living with for about six weeks, and already the pressure is mounting to sign up for a house before all the good ones are gone. It can be overwhelming to have letting adverts mounting up in your letter box when you are just about settled into your flat.
Time and consideration should be put in to who you want to live with the following year, and in my opinion, it is too soon to tell if you are going to clash with someone over the minor things – such as sharing the television remote, or the bigger issues like splitting the bills.
Being a fresher last year, my flat mates and I assumed that all students living in a city were viewing houses with people they barely knew in November and December.
But Sheffield is unusual in this pressured rush – most other city students don’t consider finding houses until January. At the University of Leeds the majority of house listings don’t even come out until the New Year, and most students sign for a house between mid to late January.
So why the mad rush? When walking down Broomhill there are flashing ‘letting available’ signs everywhere you turn, with houses already ‘let.’ This madness confuses me: surely there is enough student housing to accommodate the students of Sheffield? The accommodation rush is therefore simply unnecessary, but just a bad habit encouraged by greedy letting agents.
I would suggest ‘beating the rush,’ but I fear that would mean house searching the summer before you have even moved into your accommodation for September.