11-bedroom luxury student HMO · for Keele University students

A handsome building near Newcastle-under-Lyme town centre, with an unusual history: originally two terraced houses, later converted into offices, and now needing to come back as residential. Location is everything for a student HMO, and although Keele University campus is more than two miles away, this property has a competitive locational story. Newcastle-under-Lyme bus station sits across the road (direct buses to Keele campus). The town centre is on the doorstep, supermarkets, coffee shops, bars, restaurants. There's even a Domino's around the corner.

The brief HYPE set itself: build the student HMO that students actually want. Not the corner-cutting kind that meets minimum spec, the kind that competes with the purpose-built luxury student accommodation around the area.

Two-terraces-to-eleven-bedrooms means a substantial reconfiguration. Every bedroom got its own en-suite. Cat 5 cable points in every room for proper wired broadband. USB ports built into the wall plates. Communal amenity rooms added in: a cinema room, a chill-out / study room, a dedicated laundry. The level of HMO amenity you don't get in the cheap student rental stock and you DO get in the £150-a-week purpose-built blocks, but at HMO economics.

The wheelie bin store deserves its own paragraph. HYPE has done enough HMO conversions to know that waste and recycling is a recurring tenant friction point, tenants leave it to each other, bins don't go out, the property starts to smell. We dedicated planning to it: a bin store at the front of the property so tenants on collection day only need to open the bin store doors and wheel the bins a few feet to the kerb. No dragging from the rear. The operational detail that separates HMOs students stay in for one year from HMOs they renew.

A former two-terrace-then-office building became an 11-bedroom luxury student HMO that competes for the same tenants who'd otherwise be paying purpose-built rates. Students stay 11 months a year and are typically strangers to Stoke-on-Trent when they arrive: they have enough to worry about already. HYPE doesn't think their living space should be one of those things. This one isn't.