UCC president urges Cork landlords to cut prices as students travel long distances to college

University College Cork (UCC) has written to a number of private landlords in Cork City, urging them to reduce rental prices, pointing out a number of properties at a walking distance of the university have a 40% vacancy rate.

UCC president John O’Halloran said the college is urging landlords to cut prices to try to address its current accommodation crisis. 

[/url]It has already had a successful outcome with a number of property owners.

The university currently houses 1,600 students in its own accommodation and offers some of the cheapest rents in the city.

Depending on their facilities and age, these rooms range from €105 to €236 per week. However, they are oversubscribed.

Prof O’Halloran said the college authorities are to increase their owned and managed accommodation blocks to host 2,000 students.

This may include buying up privately-owned properties nearby, as well as developing some underutilised sections of buildings owned by the university.

The income derived from this will be put back into maintaining and improving existing accommodation.

Increasingly, students are commuting daily to the university from West Cork, North Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Kerry because rental prices in the city have climbed so high they’re completely out of their reach.

Prof O’Halloran said the lack of affordable student accommodation “is a really big issue for us”.

He said UCC has identified that some private rental properties within walking distance have an unoccupied rate of up to 40%, primarily as they are seeking too much rent.

Prof O’Halloran said: “We want the private market to have price structure to make it affordable for our students. We would argue that rooms are not being filled and this is costing them [the owners]. Our office of accommodation has already reached out successfully to some of these private owners who have discounted rents [for students].”

Pressure on accommodation in the area is due to UCC having a student population of 27,000, plus 3,700 staff. That is a bigger cohort of people than living in Kilkenny City.

“In fact, UCC is currently the 14th largest settlement in the country,” he said.

The college is working closely with the student union to try to make life easier for commuters.

Prof O’Halloran said while improved rail service frequencies from Midleton and Mallow in particular have helped some students, a push is being made to improve more frequent and reliable bus services by educational establishments in the city.

“UCC, MTU [Munster Technological University], and Cork ETB [Education and Training Board] have put a proposal to the Department of Transport to provide better bus connectivity,” he said.

Prof O’Halloran said they have not yet received a positive reply from the department on this, “but we’ll hopefully convince them”.

Councillors representing municipal districts in East Cork, Fermoy, and West Cork have repeatedly highlighted problems with unreliable bus services in their regions which are seriously impacting students commuting to third-level institutions in Cork City.

There have been repeated complaints from students that they have been late for lectures.

The university has students from more than 150 countries.

They account for about 21% of the total student cohort.

Prof O’Halloran, who has been in charge of UCC since 2021, said the largest foreign-born contingent is from India, followed by China and the US.

He pointed out that the current student population is a far cry from the first intake of 115 in 1849. Then there were just 23 staff, all of whom were men.

“It took nearly 100 years to get student numbers above the 1,000 mark,” he said.

Recent independently-verified studies have shown UCC is worth around €1.2bn annually to the Irish economy.

For every euro the State invests in the university, it gets a €6 return. It is also estimated that the university supports directly or indirectly one in every 13 jobs in Cork City.