Sustainability and wellness in Purpose Built Student Accommodation UK with Fusion Group
Fusion's Dean Street Manchester
Towards a wellbeing strategy for student life
This is episode 068 of the Green Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality.
Today I’m in the UK talking to Laura Wood, Head of Marketing at Fusion Group, previously known as Fusion Students, where she oversees letting strategy, PR and communication as well as student welfare and experience for a brand based around ‘positive living’.
Laura has more than a decade of PR and marketing expertise and is something of a Purpose Built Student Accommodation, or ‘PBSA’ expert.
Full disclosure, Fusion are my client, so we’ve been working together for the past six months or so designing their leisure spaces, gyms and wellness facilities in Nottingham, Manchester, London and Birmingham.
We’ll obviously touch on that in our conversation but I also want to look at the wider themes of sustainability and wellbeing within the purpose built student accommodation sector in the UK.
Fusion Group - a leader in PBSA development UK
01:10.81
mattmorley
Why don't we start with sustainability in particular because in residential real estate development in the UK it's now almost obligatory.
It's very hard to do much in terms of planning permissions nowadays without a sustainability plan so how does that impact your work in the purpose built student accommodation sector with Fusion Group?
Sustainability and wellbeing in PBSA developments
01:42.47
Laura
Yeah I suppose our core demographic is the younger generation for student housing in particular. So I think it has certainly become more integral to a lot of the processes that we have to do but in terms of our approach, our vision and values as a business it's intrinsic to the fact that our core demographic is the younger generation domestic students and so sustainability and wellness are incredibly important to them, especially over the past few years.
These students were raised on social media. It would almost be naive of us to not have sustainability and wellness as a very integral part of our business because it's so important to our and customers and you know rightly so they are demanding a lot more from businesses nowadays I Think.
Our sector is slightly behind real estate in general, but people are responding to it. We're certainly responding to it, in fact it's integral to our values and the people within the business. We're all very passionate about it.
the role of sustainability in purpose built student accommodation
03:10.10
mattmorley
And how does sustainability play through into the students residential experience?
Laura
Well for us it's integral. So yes, we follow design standards according to sustainability. So for us it's BREEAM but beyond that it's also a lifestyle and awareness of that lifestyle because it is the forefront of a lot of conversations for younger people.
I think there's a lot of fear-mongering in the media. But people want to learn more. They want to understand how they could be more supportive and helpful. And part of our responsibility is to open those conversations and not to say that we have all of the answers.
Sustainable events in PBSA developments
How can we allow for events that take place in our buildings to support some of these sustainable values for example? We've done things like clothes swaps, we have Zero Waste stores in some of our future PBSA development schemes.
They're not necessarily going to change the world. But it definitely helps to create those foundations of a sustainable lifestyle that students can choose to adopt if they want to but is equally not forced upon them. It's about creating a range of such sustainability touch points.
It's identifying areas where we can open those conversations I think events for us are brilliant and because it means that we can identify pockets or groups of students that would be really interested in certain aspects, for example we've done nutrition talks in the past.
Fitness spaces and mental wellness in the student experience
Obviously our fitness spaces are ideal for that kind of activity. So even if it's having meditation sessions or dark yoga. So we're switching all the lights off and encouraging that kind of conversation around energy use.
Adjusting the interior design of a PBSA development to foster wellness
In our Birmingham scheme, it's a city known and for being very industrial. A lot of the PBSA products around us there use that industrial design aesthetic, which is great but our conversation was well, how could we create a wellbeing oasis within that industrial area and how could the students use our building almost as a bit of respite from the hard reality of the city.
Biophilic design in student housing for mental wellbeing
So we developed our Birmingham PBSA concept completely around wellness and biophilic design - bringing nature inside and we've designed a zen garden.A lot of our conversations around the fitness spaces are how we can link in meditation and wellness.
It's about that lifestyle of sustainability and wellness without it being forced on anyone.
Fusion’s Brent Cross Town, London development
Sustainability and wellbeing in a PBSA investment
06:55.92
mattmorley
So you're seeing those two things coming together, sustainability and health well-being as well. BREEAM is obviously an essential building block of any new UK residential construction project now.
Is there similar demand for the healthy building certifications or is the wellness piece more to do with creating facilities of your own accord rather than pursuing WELL healthy building standard certification for example?
Healthy building standards in a PBSA development
07:34.38
Laura
I think we could all push more and expect more of those standards. One of our key drivers is the relationships that we have with the local university. We're quite unique as an industry in that we're not just homes for people to live in. We are completely connected to the university and their values within that city and they differ across the Uk part of our kind of responsibility is what is important to the students that have chosen that particular university to study in.
And how can we align our values with that university with our students and ensure that it's true to Fusion as well and I think that's where the kind of WELL building standards and sustainability initiatives in student accommodation come into play.
How private developers in PBSA can contribute to university wellbeing policies
That's where we can have open discussions with the universities to say Okay, we need to support you in delivering some of your wellness strategy because Students coming to study with you are then coming home to live with us. So aligning ourselves with the University and pushing for more health and wellness policies generally We hope that we're at the forefront of doing right now
The role of leisure spaces in a PBSA wellness strategy
09:45.54
mattmorley
Over the last six months working with you has been a chance to look under the bonnet and the level of care and attention you're giving to your leisure spaces is incredible, obviously rising student numbers and strong rental growth helps push you all forward, largely driven by international students as I understand it, you've got indoor basketball courts, meditation spaces and 'zen rooms'.
You've got gyms with strength, cardio and functional training areas, outdoor gyms, yoga palates and barre Studios, even egaming rooms. Are students expecting these facilities nowadays as part of student life?
Creating an aspirational lifestyle as student numbers rise
0:42.46
Laura
They're not expecting it no, we've always understood Fusion's role within the sector is to create an aspirational lifestyle for students.
You know it's only been actually in the past maybe six or seven years that a gym was a standard in student accommodation. Students and younger people live with us every day for at least a whole year and so it's about how they want to live their life every day and it turns out fitness is a real key part to that.
The role of student accommodation gyms
We can provide them with an aspirational space to work out in but fundamentally they are doing a workout that they might do every single Tuesday or 3 times a week in the exact same way and we have to make that appealing and comforting to them.
From day one all the way through to the the day they move out with us, it's finding that balance to provide a lifestyle that feels positive and aspirational but also functional and something they'll use time and again.
ESG initiatives in a PBSA investment
When you start working with institutional investors and as you grow as a business and pension funds start coming in and bigger investors start coming in. There's there's more and more talk obviously around the importance of ESG strategy and investments. So are you seeing any particular interest is that?
14:03.40
Laura
Yeah, it's definitely happening, it does put pressure on the whole sector to step their game up and I think we are in a fortunate position that we've been talking like this for a while already.
COVID was really where we started to open up the conversation around sustainability and ESG in particular with our investors and we really wanted to maintain that throughout this period.
As we've been having these conversations with our partners for a number of years now it's actually made it very easy for us to keep pushing this theme from an established position.
16:16.76
Fusion student accommodation development
mattmorley
So we've touched on the E Environmental already, I'll leave the 'G' or governance aside I think it's almost beyond the remit of our conversation today.
But let's look at the 'S', the Social because you know the student mental health crisis is clearly a topic that is top of mind for anyone involved in this space and anyone with an interest in mental health and wellbeing and especially for us at Biofit creating spaces designed to promote mental wellbeing.
But for someone who's perhaps less familiar with this particular corner of mental health and wellbeing for students .. What do you see are the issues that they're facing and how can the place higher education where they live have some positive impact on that?
Student mental wellbeing and the role of PBSA in university towns
17:02.96
Laura
So I think again and our relationship with the universities in each of our cities is integral here because a lot of the conversations and pressures come from the university experience. Institutions are doing an incredible job of recognizing that offering support where it's needed, opening dialogues, working with a lot of charities as well to support them where potentially they don't have the infrastructure to be able to do that.
So our student mental wellness strategy has always been to have it as a partnership with the university to provide training for our staff because identification is an absolute integral part of how we can offer support to our students and we also do that through our interior design.
So our reception areas and and parcel collection are integral as part of our student mental health and awareness because there are maybe 500 students living in a building. Are you going to be able to have an in-depth health conversation with every person every day? No, it's impossible but we want to make sure that there is a check-in point for students and our team to connect.
mattmorley
And you mentioned one of your projects in Birmingham where you've got a strong zen influence which obviously can help create a sense of calm, you use Biophilic design prominently in your Nottingham project in development. It's a central tenet of your interior design strategy. How did that come about?
Biophilic design as a wellness interiors tool in new PBSA stock
20:26.22
Laura
Yeah nature in general is very much a part of our brand, it offers so much in terms of that positive living experience and that brand tagline of 'positive living'.
How positive the fusion team can be and we really wanted to make sure that we translate that positive outlook and connection to a lot of these topics like sustainability. Into everything that we do so positive habits positive lifestyle that's how we basically set the brief for all of our spaces and one of the best ways from the research that we've done is to have that connection to nature.
The 'zen room' that you guys designed for Nottingham was a massive conversation around how fake plants would be significantly easier from a maintenance point of view. But that's not the point you know it's not the point of the design and potentially our team will have to work a little bit harder but the benefits will be significant in that respect.
Micro gardens
21:59.12
Laura
We've also actually and had an amazing conversation yesterday on 1 of our new schemes and we've got 3 terraces and across 3 different buildings and we wanted to make sure that all of those had a different purpose so we have our kind of classic Fusion social and study terrace which is the larger one and then we have a middle terrace so we were saying well how we use this space to our advantage?
It's relatively small and the concept that we've developed is around an experimental garden, so supporting landscape architect students or bioiologists to use this outdoor space and access to nature to use it as a working environment for their studies and yes.
Gardening is kind of integral life skill that you don't really get to learn at any point, I'm so excited about that because I think it's just so something so different yet so simple and organic.
Innovative concepts from social laundry facilities to organic gardens in UK PBSA
23:55.10
mattmorley
And I wondered there's so many of these fresh ideas that you're playing with from organic herb gardens on the roof to Biophilic design, private dining spaces... Where is this cross-pollination coming from? What are the sources of inspiration.
24:43.20
Laura
Ah, everywhere really I think and we would all wish that our sector could do more overall. PBSA in the UK is not necessarily the inspirational hotbed that we would want it to become in the next five years when some of our buildings open.
Students engage with all of the different kinds property sectors and lifestyle choices. By no means are we experts in everything, we just look for our inspiration to how we can do things differently and just keep pushing the boundaries with other amenities in great locations for purpose built accommodation.
Karaoke rooms or content creator studios
For example, everywhere had K-TV rooms at a certain point and we thought yeah absolutely you know students do still love karaoke but how could we make sure that those rooms stay relevant in the next two, five or ten years?
Could we use that space for podcast recording like we're doing today or a music studio, a content creation hub? Yes, it can actually be all of those things. So how do we design for that multi-functionality to match increasing demand in the future for certain new concepts.
Future development pipeline of PBSA in the UK
27:46.79
mattmorley
In terms of future developments, what do you have in the pipeline?
27:58.33
Laura
Yeah, so we have a very strong pipeline at the moment like I said before we're actually we don't have any Fusion buildings operational at the moment but our pipeline is around 7000 beds so it's vast and it takes us through to 2027 but our team are relentlessly looking for new sites.
So the Uk is still very much our focus for now but who knows you know where we could be in the next five to 10 years time...