Executives from some of Asia Pacific’s biggest student housing players shared insights on the fast-growing asset class from a global perspective amid an uncertain geopolitical backdrop at the Mingtiandi Singapore Forum on Tuesday.
The Yardi-sponsored event brought together speakers from Australia’s Scape, London’s GSA Group and Singapore’s Wee Hur Holdings and Mapletree Investments for a panel discussion on topics ranging from tariff impacts to prospective new markets for student beds.
With the Trump tariffs and global trade war potentially rendering US universities less attractive to international students, the situation could benefit student housing in APAC markets, according to Tjarko Edzes, chief capital officer of Scape, the region’s largest platform in the space.
“First of all, you go to a university because of its ranking and the city you can live in and the experience, but also with a view of potential employment after your study,” Edzes said. “So the economy where you go to and study is pretty important. Now with higher tariffs, it’s likely that consumer prices will go up. Consumer spending might go down and would have a negative impact on the economy, and perhaps also on the labour market.”
Tensions Rising
Edzes noted that geopolitical tensions, particularly between China and America, would likely have an effect on student mobility, with the Chinese tourism ministry having already issued a warning to its citizens over travel to the US.
Global Student Housing panellists at the Mingtiandi Singapore Forum
“We have an offshore team in Shanghai of six people, and they also confirmed that at the moment, for Chinese students, they’re more inclined to go to Australia than the US,” he told the audience of over 250 executives in Singapore.
For GSA, which has just under 30,000 beds in the US under a joint venture with Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing, the on-the-ground intel suggests that visa issuances in the country have slowed, said Victor Lor, the company’s head of investment management for Asia Pacific.
“So there might be a net beneficiary from the US uncertainty whereby markets like Europe and the UK and to an extent Australia actually benefit in terms of international student flows to those markets,” Lor said.
New Frontiers
In terms of other markets ripe for exploration, Mapletree student housing CEO Matt Walker observed that Hong Kong is “seeing a moment right now” and could be in play for the Temasek-owned investment manager.
“Hong Kong, it won’t surprise anybody to say, over the past decade has changed a lot,” Walker said. “So I think that there are opportunities for change of use of standing assets, which avoid high construction cost issues and such. There’s a fair bit of ready-built product that could be easily converted to student.”
One player taking a cautious approach to new investment is SGX-listed Wee Hur, which made headlines recently with its A$1.6 billion ($1 billion) sale of an Australian student housing portfolio it held with GIC to US giant Greystar. Wee Ping Goh, the group’s chief investment officer, put his concerns bluntly to the Singapore audience.
“I’m nervous about execution. I’m nervous about war. I’m nervous about currency,” Goh said. “After we have done a good transaction, we’re just being a bit careful now. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty out there. We are not aiming to make very big moves at this point in time.”
A Panel in Pictures
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