Students: Storage for the summer?

How students are taking advantage of self storage

Every May and June, weighed down by improbable quantities of clothes, CD players, sports equipment, stolen road signs and, as the picture suggests, possibly even a few books, thousands of cars make a journey together across Britain. Although heading for different locations, their mission remains firmly uniform: to retrieve the returning son or daughter from whatever seat of learning they were dispatched to at the beginning of term. They have usually been much-missed, and the parents often can’t wait to see them again; however, the same is seldom true of their belongings.

It is perhaps fortunate then that a new option has emerged in recent years for the parents who’d rather skip these great annual migrations and leave their offspring at the mercy of Network Rail. The potential white-knight here is self storage that’s aimed at students, allowing them to leave their colossal mountains of stuff they can’t really afford in the vicinity of whichever gleaming spire they’re enrolled at, before simply reclaiming it the following September. This is an option that more and more UK students are resorting to, although with plenty of room left for further expansion.

Growing importance

Students are becoming an increasingly important demographic in lots of ways, having gone up in number every year between 1993 and 2008. Given that there are now 2.3 million of them in total studying across the country they’re becoming a consumer group it would be foolish for any business to ignore; after all, once tuition fees are taken out of the equation, they have few financial responsibilities and so can often translate much of their money into disposable income. This may be why no other age group has become associated so much in the public imagination with reckless spending, suggesting fertile ground for companies to make a profit.

Self storage has now gone in to this in a big way, offering targeted discounts that treat students as a specific group (for example, an NUS card can get you 20% off at some Safestore outlets), and tactically locating new developments near campuses and towns with large student populations. Big Yellow’s Edge Lane site in Liverpool is one such place, having been strategically built near the University of Liverpool, with the John Moores campus nearby to its east.

International demand un-leased

Any reader tempted to ask why students need storage when they could just bring their stuff home would be gratified to learn that they account for just 2% of Big Yellow’s customers. Not too many parents, it seems, are so keen to get out of making the long journeys mentioned above, and other trends would seem to be against growth in this sector, such as the increasing number of students choosing to live at home. The relative expense of self storage means it is probably only an option for the wealthier kind of student; those receiving parental support or who’ve wrangled a good job.

On the other hand, what could well be the biggest driver for student storage is the use of it made by international students, who now account for 1 in every 7 people studying at university in the UK. Whilst this has mostly been an economic boon for the institutions themselves, whose coffers now bulge with the higher-rate tuition fees they can levy, it may also help the storage industry through them being unable to transport possessions back home each summer. Most of the non-EU overseas students studying in the UK come from very far away – 50,000 from China, 25,000 from India and 15,000 Americans, to take the three largest groups – making it prohibitively expensive for them to ship their stuff back in boxes to where they spend their holidays. Indeed, many of these people choose not to pay the cost of sending themselves home, much less their belongings, remaining in Europe for the summer months. When you add in the fact that very few universities now extend their accommodation leases to cover this period, it creates a natural market for storage space among all the students who for one reason and another are unable bring their possessions home.

A bright future?

The last few years have seen record numbers of students enrolling at universities across the land, more than ever before from overseas. This fact alone should be enough to justify industry optimism at the growth opportunity students represent, but when considered alongside the extremely low (but increasing) rate at which they already take advantage of it, the use of self storage by this group will no doubt expand at an even faster rate over the coming years. This will mean, of course, fewer cars making that annual journey.

2 Responses to “Students: Storage for the summer?”

1. Mary says:

   April 9, 2010 at 1:21 pm

   This must be particularly pertinent to the overseas students who come to study in the UK. The only problem with Self Storage for Studenst is the cost surely? Have any storage companies started offering special student deals?

2. Marco says:

   August 7, 2010 at 2:30 pm

   Safe Student Storage in Manchester offers excellent storage solutions for students. Student storage at student prices!