SPH acquires 7 more student hostels, with media at the heart of it

SPH recently announced that it has acquired another 7 student hostels in the UK for $547 million.

This will add 2,383 beds to Singapore Press Holdings' (SPH) portfolio, raising it to a total of 7,726 beds across 18 cities in the UK and Germany.

In September last year, SPH started getting into student hostel business by acquiring its first 14 purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) buildings in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Huddersfield, Plymouth and Sheffield in UK for about S$321 million.

At the time, SPH CEO Ng Yat Chung said that student accommodation in the UK has growth potential. He said: 

“It will boost our real estate asset management portfolio, establish us as an overseas owner of PBSA in the UK, and allow us to pursue other growth opportunities in this sector.”

But he declined to disclose the estimated income from the PBSA business. Ng, who was the former Chief of Defence Force, is an SAF scholar who used to be a student studying in Cambridge, UK, himself.

Since last September, SPH has been aggressively acquiring student hostels particularly in UK.

In fact, in April this year, SPH spent another S$236.5 million to buy up student hostels in Southampton, Sheffield and Leeds in UK. Ng said in an interview then, “We remain disciplined in our acquisition pipeline, to build our UK PBSA portfolio to a platform of scale.”

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