The Hunger Games of Student Housing: Survival in Manchester’s Asymmetric Market

 

Photograph: Paterson (2016)

For many students moving to the University of Manchester (UoM), finding accommodation can feel like ‘The Hunger Games’. Instead of fighting for survival, students are fighting for something almost as essential: a decent place to live.

 

The Housing Rush Begins: Not Enough Roofs to Go Around

In 2023, there was a shortage of 23,186 student accommodation beds in Manchester (Amber Student, 2023). With so many terrified teenagers battling for rooms, Manchester’s annual “housing rush” begins surprisingly early. Some students even sign tenancy agreements a year before they plan to move in!

But why the absurdity?

It’s all down to asymmetric information - an imbalance of information across participants in an economic transaction (Goolsbee et al., 2024).

At UoM, information-deprived newcomers, of which 40% are international students (UCAS, 2024), struggle to view first-year accommodation in person before signing. Furthermore, excitable ‘freshers’ naturally possess limited housing knowledge and lack the time to sufficiently compare landlords’ hefty contracts (Lumley, 2025). Thus, widespread information asymmetry means that Manchester’s student housing market is less about choice and more about chance.

Figure 1: A graph to show the post-COVID surge in Higher Education demand, resulting in a squeeze on Manchester’s student accommodation (Kidd-Rossiter, 2023).

To keep up with the competition, many students turn to informal networks such as social media-based housing groups. Although these groups may appear to increase information around local alternatives, listings often spread quickly (with rooms claimed within minutes of posting), creating further pressure to secure accommodation immediately.

Figure 2: An author’s screenshot (2026) of a student Telegram group used to share housing listings during the accommodation search process.

Significantly, the majority of UoM’s first-year renters have reported issues with housing quality or maintenance (The Mancunion, 2025). Contrasts between glamorous listings and real outcomes reflect the everyday applications of information imbalances. In fact, The Mancunion (2025) revealed 140 cases of ‘rodent activity’ in Oak House (a UoM accommodation) from 2021 to 2024, and they didn’t mean the landlords!

These informational hurdles pose a vital question: Are students renting at a disadvantage?

Blind Buying: How Information Gaps Fuel Adverse Selection

According to Li and Chau (2023), uninformed buyers with less information pay higher premiums within housing markets. Thus, due to the discussed imbalances, our university (and private landlords) capitalise on students, meaning only 27% of UoM accommodation meets the National Union of Students’ affordability definition (UoM Student News, 2025).

The ‘growing perception of students as a profitable consumer market’ (Morris, 2025), combined with information gaps, has ultimately led to adverse selection in Manchester. This occurs when there are stronger incentives for “bad” types of a product to be involved in a transaction than for “good” types (Goolsbee et al., 2024). Biring (2025) suggests that there was excess demand of 2.5 students for every bed in Manchester in 2022, pressurising uninformed students to sign contracts based on availability alone. This high demand reduces the pressure on UoM and private landlords to compete on quality, allowing shabby, outdated accommodation to be consistently supplied at high premiums. The resulting dominance of subpar housing in this ‘broken’ market, therefore, amplifies Manchester’s property maintenance issues (Dickinson, 2023).

Figure 3: An image from The Mancunion (2025) to show the true state of Oak House - yuck!

Additionally, our university claims redevelopment of accommodations like Oak House will increase housing quality (UoM, 2021). However, once complete, rents are set to rise by £5,000 a year (Socialist Students, 2025), worsening market failure by excluding lower-income students and moving us further from social efficiency.

During a cost-of-living crisis, really UoM?

Figure 4: An image from a UOM student rent strike in 2020. The banner reads ‘put students and staff before profit’ (BBC, 2020).

 

Paying More, Thinking Less – a Market Explanation in Behavioural Economics

Due to the inability to view properties before renting, student housing may reflect the characteristics of an experience good (Nelson, 1970). Therefore, renting-based information cascades, where individuals make decisions based on others’ actions rather than their own private information (Bikhchandani et al., 1992), are particularly common in Manchester.

As many online platforms show the volume of inquiries into properties to signal elevated demand, prospective UoM tenants are encouraged to rush into contracts, simply due to accommodation ‘popularity’. In a frantic market, copying others feels safer than risking missing out, so peer behaviour becomes a substitute for real information. Thus, information-lacking students resemble sheep, following each other through herd behaviour into certain properties (irrespective of true quality). Put simply, we think our peers know more, but newsflash - we're all just as desperate!

Information anchors, such as local price comparisons and scarcity, also allow advertising to draw on the idea of reference dependence (Bao and Saunders, 2023). As future expectations are influenced by the framing of uncertainty, the threshold rule in behavioural economics suggests that UoM students often run to secure the first property that meets their minimum acceptable standard (Kovach and Ülkü, 2020).

Remember the story about the tortoise and the hare? In Manchester’s market, slow and steady doesn’t always win the race.

Figure 5: An Instagram post by @universal_studenthomes (2025) that anchors students on the idea of scarcity and ‘perfect accommodation’ despite no information on property details.

Moreover, landlords’ own cognitive biases may enable cascades, worsening Manchester’s rent-price problem. Blindly assuming others have better market knowledge, the greedy herd creates a rent-price spiral effect by collectively pushing prices higher. All the while, we UOM students have seen little to no improvement in accommodation quality.

Thus, mixing inherited biases with missing information leaves the market in turmoil.

 

From Commandments to Collaboration: Tackling Manchester’s Housing Madness

In recent years, Manchester City Council has introduced important policies to tackle the UoM problem:

ü  More student residences (PBSA): Further UoM construction, to increase the supply of accommodation (Manchester City Council, 2023).

 

ü  Legal controls on landlords: New minimum standards on housing conditions and safety (Manchester City Council, 2022).

 

ü  Manchester Student Homes service:  An official service to directly list properties to UoM students (Manchester Student Homes, 2024).

Figure 6 - A CGI of the University of Manchester’s plans to redevelop its Fallowfield campus (Barber, 2024).

Although such strategies have aimed to tackle supply-side and fairness issues, information asymmetry is still rampant within Manchester’s great accommodation search, enabling extortionate rents for poor quality.

To address this, we propose the introduction of a certified digital platform, jointly developed by universities and local authorities, that mandates virtual tours and standardized property information, complemented by reliable tenant review systems. Integrating this into existing UoM social media groups and the Manchester Student Homes Service would allow students to share real photos and landlord feedback, creating a fair reputation-based system. In this way, unreliable price-based quality signals can be replaced by the collective experience of UoM students. The result would be a less opaque market, where student collaboration reduces uncertainty and behavioural bias, making it more difficult for landlords to exploit asymmetric information.

If combined with legitimate efforts to increase housing supply, these changes could make Manchester’s rental market fairer, cleaner, and less stressful to navigate. Students like us deserve to escape the ‘Hunger Games’ and climb up the information ladder, restoring symmetry.

Ultimately, until we know as much as our pesky landlords do, we’ll keep on paying the price for it - literally!

Reference List:

Amber Student (2023). Manchester Faces Severe Shortage of Student Accommodation, Ranks Among UK’s Most Undersupplied Cities. Available at: https://amberstudent.com/news/post/manchester-faces-severe-shortage-of-student-accommodation-ranks-among-uks-most-undersupplied-cities

Bao, H. X. H. and Saunders, R. (2023). Reference Dependence in the UK Housing Market. Housing Studies, 38(7), pp. 1191–1219. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2021.1935767

Barber, O. (2024). Manchester City Council Approves Proposals for Over 5,000 New Student Beds. Housing Today. Available at: https://www.housingtoday.co.uk/news/manchester-city-council-approves-proposals-for-over-5000-new-student-beds/5127351.article

BBC (2020). Manchester University Students ‘Occupy’ Building in Rent Protest. BBC News, 12 Nov. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-54921866

Bikhchandani, S., Hirshleifer, D. and Welch, I. (1992). A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades. Journal of Political Economy, 100(5), pp. 992–1026. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/261849

Biring, N. (2025). Manchester PBSA Sector Spotlight – ‘A Battle for Beds’. Available at: https://pbsanews.co.uk/article/manchester-pbsa-sector-spotlight-a-battle-for-beds

Dickinson, J. (2023). A Broken Student Housing Market Can’t Deliver Safety. Wonkhe. Available at: https://wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/a-broken-student-housing-market-cant-deliver-safety-let-alone-somewhere-to-break-bread/

Goolsbee, A., Levitt, S., and Syverson, C. (2024). Microeconomics. New York: Macmillan Learning.

Kidd-Rossiter, M. (2023). Greater Manchester’s Student Squeeze. Available at: https://lichfields.uk/blog/2023/february/9/greater-manchester-s-student-squeeze

Kovach, M. and Ülkü, L. (2020). Satisficing with a Variable Threshold. Journal of Mathematical Economics, 87, pp.67–76. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmateco.2019.12.005

Li, L. and Chau, K.W. (2023). Information Asymmetry with Heterogeneous Buyers and Sellers in the Housing Market. The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-023-09939-y

Lumley, S. (2025). Student Tenants Lack Renting and Financial Literacy. Available at: https://www.accommodationforstudents.com/student-landlord-guides/4566

Manchester City Council (2022). Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) licensing. Available at: https://www.manchester.gov.uk

Manchester City Council (2023). Manchester Local Plan and Student Housing Development Policies. Available at: https://www.manchester.gov.uk

Manchester Student Homes (2024). About Manchester Student Homes. Available at: https://www.manchesterstudenthomes.com

Morris, K. (2025). Another Brick in the Wall: The student housing crisis in the UK and the ICESCR. Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, 43(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/09240519251318141

Nelson, P. (1970). Information and Consumer Behavior. Journal of Political Economy, 78(2), pp. 311–329. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1830691

Paterson, A. (2016). Student house to let sign outside a house. Available at: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-student-house-to-let-sign-outside-a-house-96618245.html

The Mancunion (2025). 84% of student renters face accommodation issues. Available at: https://mancunion.com/2025/02/14/84-of-student-renters-face-accommodation-issues/

UCAS (2024). University of Manchester statistics. Available at: https://www.ucas.com/explore/unis/01b03c44/university-of-manchester/stats?studyYear=2024

UoM Students News (2025). University accommodation rent prices for next year. Available at: https://studentnews.manchester.ac.uk/2025/02/04/university-accommodation-rent-prices-for-next-year/

UOM (2021). Fallowfield student campus. The University of Manchester. Available at: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/governance/corporate-documents/campus-masterplan/fallowfield-consultation/