As I've mentioned previously a few times, most of Unite Group's PBSA portfolio is actually performing surprisingly well if you ignore media narratives and look at results e.g. see FY2025 results back in February [1]

"The majority of our portfolio performed strongly, with 19 of 22 cities averaging 97% occupancy. Vacancies were concentrated in three regional cities (Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield)"

Unite don't seem to have issued an announcement yet but BENews & other local news report that Unite has just offloaded about 1200 beds in one of those cities, Sheffield. [2,3]

The acquirer, MCR Property Group, already operates PBSA in Sheffield, and this doubles their footprint there.

Hopefully a good price has been achieved; you can see the logic for both sides.

Unite Group frees up time/money/attention/staff for other things, hopefully redeploys the money into buybacks while the opportunity is still there.

MCR gets better local operational scale / marketing scale and less competition. Win/win.

This transaction solves about 1/6 of the occupancy problems.

Unite still has, I think:

around 1500 beds in Sheffield?

around 1500 beds in Leicester?

around 2500 beds in Nottingham?

TRS

[1] londonstockexchange.com - Results for the year ended december

[2] benews.co.uk - Mcr acquires sheffield pbsa portfolio from unite

[3] placeyorkshire.co.uk - Mcr acquires sheffield pbsa portfolio