Subject: Re: Unite Group UTG, couple of notes
"I think we all (management and potential investors both) should be aware of the risk that the target UK student population was in a bubble and may shrink a lot."
...
Well, it's hard to point at anything in the market lately, any asset class or sector, that isn't in a bubble of some sort.

True enough, but there is a difference between a price bubble and a business bubble. It's the latter risk that concerns me here.

I think it's entirely conceivable that the total addressable market for UK student housing in the next 10-15 years could average only (say) 80% of its recent peak. i.e., the number of students who might even consider a place at one, even at the top universities. They have played in the bubble as much as anyone.

That's not a prediction, but it seems eminently possible as a risk to the investment thesis, for a variety of (to me) plausible reasons. Populist backlash, geopolitical friction, schools improving elsewhere in the world, price elasticity, facility closures due to budget crunches, and having strip mined the good name of the top UK universities by overexpanding into mediocrity. (if you consider the separate "industry" of ex-UK campuses, the top schools were the worst offenders in that regard)

Note, that's not to say UTG isn't perhaps a fine investment at current prices, but I like to look at the things that could go wrong. With LTV around merely 1/4 a debt crisis is unlikely, so a painfully shrinking industry seems to be among the biggest. The simplest view is to look at the size of the industry 20 years ago and search for unassailable reasons to believe it couldn't be that small again. I can't think of one, offhand.

I appreciate your figures that demand is high and if anything rising at the high tariff universities. That's good, but that's now. I think that could change.

There's an old rule of thumb never to invest in a concept restaurant chain, they always grow till they pop. It's a different industry, but perhaps not 100.00% different. The budgets got cut, and foreign students were the lever they reached for, then soaked, and soaked some more. Maybe that will work to plug the hole forever, and maybe it won't.

Jim