The student accommodation sector has spent years talking about resident engagement. And yet, for many PBSA operators, the gap between residents knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it remains wide – especially in the context of sustainable living. There is a key question in the industry around why the standard approaches can often fall short, and what the evidence tells us about what really works.
That was the focus of Utopi’s latest Lunch & Learn, bringing together Stuart Henderson, Managing Director at Luna Students, and Saket Rao, Senior Behavioural Scientist at HRW, hosted by Chanel Turner-Ross, Utopi’s Head of Marketing. The result was one of the most substantive conversations we have hosted, and the first topic voted for directly by our audience, who asked for a deeper look at resident engagement.
Missed the session? Watch the full recording of our February 2026 Lunch & Learn: From Awareness to Action: Unlocking Sustainable Student Behaviours here.
Redefining What Good Resident Experience Actually Means
Stuart Henderson opened with a question the PBSA sector has been wrestling with for years: what does great resident experience actually look like in 2026?
Rebooker rates, long the go-to metric, no longer tell the whole story. As rental prices have climbed and the student demographic has shifted – more postgraduates, more international students, more residents paying at a level where expectation is high – the bar for what constitutes a good experience has moved.
“It’s got to be somewhere where people feel comfortable, supported, respected,” Stuart said. “It’s delivering a home.”
For Luna, that means thinking well beyond occupancy statistics. It means understanding that the same building may house a domestic undergraduate for whom PBSA is a social rite of passage, and an international postgraduate who has spent thousands to relocate and expects something close to professional residential living. No single engagement strategy serves both equally.
The operator’s responsibility, Stuart argued, extends into three interconnected areas: welfare, sustainability, and value for money. These are not competing priorities – they reinforce each other. A resident who trusts their operator, understands their building’s systems, and feels genuinely cared for is more likely to engage with sustainability initiatives, less likely to create energy waste, and more likely to rebook.
What the Data Actually Shows: Three Real-World Scenarios
Chanel Turner-Ross, Utopi’s Head of Marketing, followed Stuart’s perspective with three data stories drawn directly from UK PBSA assets using The Utopi Platform. Each illustrating what room-level, granular data makes visible — and what that visibility enables operators to do when it comes to understanding resident behaviours:
The rogue heater.
One studio was consuming 20 kWh per day – more than double the average UK home’s daily usage. The site team found a plug-in electric heater. After a single conversation with the resident, consumption dropped by 57%. Multiply that across 20 or 30 rogue heaters in a 300-bed asset, and the impact compounds quickly.
The charging station.
A studio consuming 61 kWh per day — over seven times the national average — turned out to be a resident charging power tools across multiple outlets. Left undetected, that would have cost over £1,500 across a 200-day heating season and generated 684 kg of carbon. Enough energy, as Chanel noted, to drive the length of the UK three times in a petrol vehicle.
The Bitcoin miner.
A room flagged at 1,200% above the site average was running multiple servers around the clock. The resident agreed to a compromise – servers on only when in the room – cutting daily consumption by 27 kWh and saving over £3,000 across the season. They did not fully change their behaviour. They negotiated. The data made that conversation possible.
As Chanel put it:
“If you can get that resident engagement right, it can have a real effect at scale across your assets.”
The thread connecting all three stories is the same: without granular, room-level data, none of these conversations happen. Without engaged, capable site teams acting on that data, the insight also sits unused. And without a culture of resident engagement already embedded in the building, the conversation itself becomes adversarial.
Why Information Alone Does Not Change Behaviour
Senior Behavioural Scientist, Saket Rao explained, changing behaviours begins from a different premise than most resident engagement strategies. It does not assume that people who know the right thing will do the right thing. It assumes they are well-intentioned, genuinely busy, and highly influenced by context. But shockingly doesn’t actually start with motivation.
He explored the gap between intention and action, between a student who agrees that sustainability matters and one who actually turns off the heating when they leave the room, is not a motivation gap. It is an environment gap. As Saket framed it:
“Most people, including students, don’t wake up intending to do the wrong thing. But somewhere between intention and action, that’s where real life happens. That’s where behaviour often breaks down.”
Saket identified two forces that consistently get in the way:
Friction. Small barriers and extra steps that make the right behaviour harder than the wrong one. Removing friction often requires no new technology. It requires clearer instructions, better interfaces, and on-site teams who can walk residents through the tools available to them.
Cognitive load. The mental bandwidth available to a student at 8am on a Monday morning, fresh and rested, is meaningfully different to that available at 8pm on a Thursday after four hours of lectures and an assignment deadline looming. The information might not change. The cognitive capacity to process it does.
The practical implication is straightforward: timing matters. Sustainability messaging sent late on a Thursday evening will not land the same way it does mid-morning on a Tuesday. Testing communication at different points in the week, and measuring the behavioural response through existing energy data, is a low-cost way to find what actually works in a specific building with a specific resident population.
Saket also raised the role of social norms. International students, arriving in an unfamiliar cultural context, are more likely to look to the people around them to understand what is normal and expected. This makes the on-site team’s behaviour as influential as any campaign. If site staff embody the values the operator is trying to communicate, residents notice.
The Practical Takeaway: Better Questions, Not Just Better Campaigns
The session closed with a point from Saket that is worth holding onto as a framework:
“The data shows you patterns. Behavioural insight explains why. And the context and testing reveals what actually works. Behavioural science doesn’t give you answers – it helps you ask better questions.”
The data tells you what is happening and when. Behavioural science tells you why. The context, the specific demographic, the time of year, the building culture, the on-site team, determines what will actually work. And the only way to know whether a specific intervention is effective is to test it against measurable outcomes, using the energy and occupancy data that good IoT infrastructure already generates.
That is what the combination of room-level data, engaged site teams, and a genuine understanding of resident behaviour makes possible. Not a perfect outcome in every case, but a meaningful, measurable shift. One conversation at a time. One room at a time. And at scale across a portfolio, that compounds quickly.
Watched the session? You can ask us any follow up questions here.
The next Utopi Lunch & Learn topic will once again be shaped by the industry. If you have a topic you want to see covered, get in touch. To explore how Utopi’s platform helps operators turn environmental data into resident engagement strategies, visit utopi.co.uk.