The Koala was fortunate to attend the PBSA Forum in Sydney yesterday, hosted by The Property Council. The forum offered a slightly different lens to view the current state of international education, and a welcome one. Anouk Darling of Scape and Chair of the Student Accommodation Council opened the forum with a powerful address. The Koala thanks Anouk for permission to publish this as an opinion piece. Enjoy.
I’m not going to open by telling you how far this sector has come. You were all there and have contributed to building it.
I want to start somewhere less comfortable.
There is a number in our own research that I can use two ways today. And so can the people arguing against us.
7.3. For every purpose built bed in this country, there are 7.3 students. In Western Australia it is 10.8.
I read that as too few beds.A market opportunity. Yet someone on a radio panel this week will read it as too many students.
And that, in one number, is why we keep losing this argument. Our best statistic sounds like their best argument.
So let me give you the number that cannot be turned around.
Our national pipeline is 47,233 beds. 13k are under construction. 21,765k hold planning approval, but have no crane on them.
Nearly half the beds in Australia’s pipeline have permission to be built, and are not being built.
You cannot blame a student for that. Not one of those beds is missing because too many people came here to study. They are missing because the numbers aren’t working.
This is not a planning problem. It’s a viability problem. And viability is a polite word for the fact that the rules we operate under were written for somebody else’s business.
This year the SAC put that on the record properly. Unfit for Purpose, the independent research we commissioned from Urbis, says what this sector has been saying in corridors for a decade, with the evidence attached.
We are regulated as landlords. We operate as institutions. Yet we are invisible in the supply solution.
A residential tenancy framework assumes someone signs a lease, stays a year or two, and wants to be left alone. Our residents arrive in February, in their thousands, sometimes on the same weekend. Most have never been in this country. Many are eighteen. They leave in November. They need a bond process that works across a semester, a break lease provision that understands a deferred visa, and safety obligations written for congregate living.
And let me be clear, because it is the accusation that will be made. We are not asking for lighter regulation. We are asking for regulation that matches what we actually do. In most cases the fit for purpose version is harder on us, not easier.
So the SAC’s position is direct. Recognise PBSA as a distinct accommodation class. Where a standalone framework isn’t on the table, amend the Residential Tenancies Acts to reflect reality. Break lease. Semester turnover.
And count us. Forty seven thousand beds in the pipeline, and this sector does not appear in the national housing numbers. You cannot ask an industry to help solve a problem you haven’t conceded it is part of.
Which brings me to the fight actually in front of us.
We already have a cap. Two hundred and ninety five thousand. And there are now proposals on the table to cut student numbers by another third (no thanks to One Nation).
International students are the easiest target in Australian politics. They cannot vote. They have no lobby of their own. They are eighteen, they are new here, and they are gone in three years. That makes them cheap to expend, and right now they are expendable.
They are being weaponised for populism by people who have done none of the work on what it costs. Not to this sector, not to the universities, not to the contractors and the jobs attached to every crane in our pipeline, and not to an export industry that took a generation to build.
Mandala’s research puts international students at six percent of Australia’s rental market. Six percent. You do not fix a national housing shortage by removing six percent of the demand. What you do is send the student to Manchester, or Toronto, or Singapore.
Cutting student numbers does not build a single home. It cancels the ones that were coming.
Every feasibility in this sector is underwritten on enrolment growth. Take a third of the demand out of the market and those 21,765 approved beds are never funded. Caps will not fix Australia’s housing shortage. They will lock it in, and they will do it in the one part of the market that was actually adding supply.
The operator who stays silent to protect this year’s revenue is the same operator who discovers in three years that this sector has no political standing, no asset class, no place in the housing numbers, and no pipeline to grow into. You will have won a rate review and lost an industry.
So when the Council speaks on student caps, it speaks for all of us. Operators who compete on everything else. Universities. Investors. And the suppliers whose order books depend on cranes that only turn if the students come.
We are the infrastructure that makes this export possible, and we are treated as its side effect. We are also the only people in this debate who can say, with evidence, that we are part of the supply answer and not the demand problem.
If we cannot hold that line together, we do not deserve the sector recognition we are asking for.
Now the part that actually matters to me.
Every one of us in this room sells beds. None of us are in the bed business.
A bed is the least interesting thing any of us offers. What matters is what happens around it. Whether an eighteen year old who landed thirty six hours ago, in a city she has never seen, has someone to eat with on the first night. Whether the city starts to feel like hers, or like somewhere she is passing through. Whether she goes home in three years with a degree and a network, or a degree and a story about being lonely.
That is the business. Every operator here, competitors included. We compete on rent, on design, on location, on brand. We should, and I intend to keep beating most of you at it! But not one of us competes on whether a student is safe, or supported, or counted. That is the minimum.
Somewhere in a building one of you has not finished yet is a student none of us has met. She is going to start something, or cure something, or teach in a town that cannot get teachers. We will not get the credit for it, nor should we. We will simply have made sure she had somewhere to do it from.
And if the suggested changes in caps land, she doesn’t come.
So, to the operators, the investors, the universities, and to the partners and suppliers who build and service what the rest of us operate: you are not vendors to this sector, you are its capacity.
The sector is ready. We have 21,765 approved beds waiting on settings that make sense, and capital that wants to build them. What we are asking government for is not subsidy. It is recognition, and rules that reflect reality.
Once we have that, this industry will put tens of thousands of beds into Australian cities, take real pressure off rental markets, protect one of our largest exports, and give a generation of young people somewhere decent to begin.
Withhold it, and those beds stay on paper.
Thank you to Mike Zorbas and the Property Council, the SAC team, Executive Director Adele Lausberg, my deputy chairs Richard Smith, Thomas Johanssen and John Huber and to every member who put their name to this year’s advocacy when it was easier to stay quiet.
This year we stopped asking to be included, and started proving why we should be.
Thank you.
Anouk Darling is the CEO of Scape Australia (part of The Living Company), where she leads the country’s largest Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) platform. She is a strong voice in housing policy and urban design, serving as Chair of the Student Accommodation Council and a Board Director of the Property Council of Australia. Her advocacy supports greater resilience, equity and investment in the living sector.
