A new €8,000 campaign by Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) and University College Dublin Students’ Union (UCDSU), in partnership with the accommodation website Daft.ie, will encourage homeowners to rent out rooms to students in an attempt to provide a short-term solution to the accommodation crisis. This could be a huge help to students who are in desperate need. If a homeowner is not sure they should there are precautions that can be taken by them, such as checking with their home insurance company if they are covered in case something happens when a student is living in their home. Checking out sites like www.simplyinsurance.com/best-homeowners-insurance-pa/ can get you to see a policy in which you might be better suited if you are thinking about accommodating a student.
The project will feature blog post testimonials of student experiences of digs accommodation, as well as advertising campaigns across a range of websites including Daft.ie and sister websites.
Daft.ie is Ireland’s largest property website, generating over 95 million page views each month. During the campaign, the website will be promoting geo-targeted adverts online, as well as a joint social media campaign.
The campaign marks an expansion of the union’s previous efforts to support students looking for accommodation. Speaking to The University Times , TCDSU President, Kieran McNulty, outlined the benefits of the new scheme: “With Daft, we’re going to have our banner seen by about half a million people, not just on Daft.ie but the companies that they run. So it’s really going to bring more attention to it than a Facebook or social media page ever could”.
TCDSU have piloted a number of measures in the past in an attempt to help students find accommodation, including a digs campaign, which this campaign can be seen as an expansion of. “In the past couple of years we’ve done flyering, and we’ll be doing that again this year in Dublin areas. We’ve got the flyer design now so that will be sent out in the next week or so, to every home in areas that it’s conceivable that you can travel to and from college”, McNulty said.
The union will also be running the Accommodation Advisory Service, which last year saw an increase in use to almost 3,000 students. McNulty also emphasised attempts by the union to coordinate the passing on of student houses to fellow students, as well as working with landlords and “working with USI on the national accommodation schemes.”
In a press release sent out this morning, McNulty and his counterpart in UCDSU, Conor Viscardi, said that the campaign will promote the benefits of the tax incentives homeowners can receive if they open their homes to students. By doing this, they hope to “be able to create a couple of hundred new bed spaces for students in a matter of weeks rather than years”.
McNulty and Viscardi suggested that the campaign would be aimed at the kind of students that are “happier in a home setting than they would be in the typical student bedsit”.
For the last number of years, students in Dublin, alongside much of the city’s population, have been faced with rising rents and a lack of available accommodation. Citing an “overcrowded” private sector and referencing university accommodation they describe as “underdeveloped”, both union presidents hope that this new plan will provide some solution to the housing crisis many students find themselves in.
The campaign, while aimed at students, also focuses on homeowners who may have spare rooms capable of being rented out. “It’s very much a done thing all across Europe, so it’s really something we want to push, and push as much as we can”, McNulty said.
McNulty and Viscardi will also write the introduction to the Daft.ie annual report, in a further attempt to bring attention to the student accommodation crisis.
The crisis has attracted increased attention in recent weeks, with the government last week outlining a new plan to support the creation of 7,000 student accommodation places by the end of 2019. The ambitious action plan, which will be overseen by the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Simon Coveney, will also see the creation of a national student accommodation strategy in 2017 and a new Student Housing Officer who will work with the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) to address the shortage in accommodation.
Commenting on the government’s accommodation plans, McNulty said: “While the housing scheme laid out by the government last week has a number of great measures for long-term planning, short-term there’s really not much happening for students, and demand for housing grows year-on-year.”
Many of the points put forward in the government’s action plan were recommended in a report made by the Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness in June. USI made a number of recommendations to the committee, many of which were included in the final report — including the creation of a Student Housing Officer.
Universities are also making efforts to address the deficit in student accommodation. Trinity’s 280-bed Oisín House accommodation project is scheduled for completion by summer 2018, and will be completed at a cost of €52 million. The plan includes space for both the disability service and the health centre, and for the sports clubs displaced by the demolition of Luce Hall.
The building, which will be built on Pearse Street, will centre around an open courtyard and will also include a mezzanine area overlooking a handball court and three squash courts.
Similarly, the new Grangegorman site for Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) will include 500 new student accommodation places. While no other universities have committed to such large-scale accommodation projects, the government’s new action plan states that the development in DIT will be used as a “model for funding that will be rolled out to other locations”.
Sinéad Baker contributed reporting to this piece.
