It’s time to catch up, to protect your resources.
By Clare Ody, FIoL, PC.dp.(GDPR), VP Brand and Partnerships, Kinetic
Picture the scene: It is the end of term. A small accommodation team is working through a stack of paper inspection sheets, cross-referencing with a spreadsheet, trying to confirm which rooms need maintenance sign-off before the next intake arrives. Someone cannot read their own handwriting from three weeks ago. The compliance record for an entire block is missing from the shared drive. A student has raised a dispute about the condition their room was returned in, and there is no photographic evidence to support either side of the argument.
This is not a story about a team that is not good at their jobs. It is a story about a team doing their best with a system that was never designed to keep up with the demands placed on it.
I have spent over a decade working in PBSA operations (and even longer in the sector), and I have seen this scene play out in different buildings, different cities, different operators. The details change, but the underlying problem does not.
It starts at the beginning: the arrival inventory
Before we get to mid-term checks or vacating inspections, there is the moment a student arrives and picks up their keys. That moment is the foundation of everything that follows, and in too many institutions it is still handled with a paper form in a welcome pack or an inventory handed over at a busy reception desk, filled in by an excited student who is focused on settling in and meeting their flatmates, and returned days later with minimal detail.
A digital arrival inventory changes the dynamic entirely. Sent to students automatically as they check in, or scheduled to send at the start of their tenancy, it guides them item by item through a structured checklist. They photograph existing damage. They log a maintenance issue they have spotted. They sign off digitally that they have checked in properly. The whole process is timestamped, stored automatically and immediately visible to the accommodation team.
Critically, that inventory does not sit in a folder and get forgotten. It becomes the baseline for every inspection that follows. When a mid-term visit takes place, the team opens the same record and adds to it. When a student vacates, the comparison is right there: here is how the room was when they arrived, here is how it is now. No disputes about what was pre-existing. No disagreement about who is responsible for what. Just a clear, shared, auditable record that both sides can see.
That is not a luxury. For a sector that handles thousands of tenancy cycles a year, it is the only approach that scales.
“The thing customers kept telling us was that an inventory on its own was not enough. They needed it to do something. When a student flags a maintenance issue on arrival, that should not sit in a document somewhere waiting for someone to notice it. It should immediately become a job to be done. That connection between the inventory record and the maintenance workflow is what transforms check-in from an admin task into the start of a properly managed tenancy.” – George Lengyel, Head of Apps, Kinetic
The quiet normalisation of a broken process
Universities have invested significantly in student experience over the past decade; digital booking journeys, arrival experiences, wellbeing platforms, app-based communications, mental health support infrastructure. The ambition to meet students where they are, and to build services that feel modern and responsive, is genuine and visible.
But the inspection process has, in many cases, been left behind.
Paper forms, disconnected spreadsheets and manual sign-off chains remain the norm in university accommodation rather than the exception. And because the process has always worked this way, and because teams are stretched and there are always more urgent priorities, it tends to stay that way. The backlog does not announce itself. It accumulates quietly, inspection by inspection, term by term, until something goes wrong.
“The admin burden was unsustainable. Every inspection round meant hours of data entry, manual cross-referencing, and writing individual emails to students. KxInspections gave us so much of that time back.” – Emily Meeson, Assistant to the Home Bursar, New College, Oxford
The compliance exposure most teams do not see coming
The Universities UK (UUK) and GuildHE Code of Practice sets clear expectations around the condition of accommodation and the obligations of providers. Inspections are not optional, and the quality of the audit trail matters. Not in a theoretical sense, but in a very practical one: when a student dispute reaches a formal stage, or when an external review looks at compliance records, the documentation you have on file becomes the difference between a resolved issue and a reputational problem.
“In my time working in higher education, the inspection process was always treated as an operational task rather than a strategic one. But every time something went wrong with a student complaint or a compliance review, it came back to the quality of the record. Teams were not cutting corners deliberately. They simply did not have tools that made a proper audit trail realistic within the time and resources they had available.” – Mark Atkinson, VP of Innovation Acceleration, Kinetic
That gap between what good compliance practice requires and what manual processes can realistically deliver is where the risk lives.
Safety is not a separate conversation
There is a dimension to this that goes beyond paperwork and process, and it deserves to be said plainly: students have a right to live in buildings that are safe and well maintained. Not just broadly adequate, but genuinely safe.
For universities and PBSA with high-rise residential buildings, the Building Safety Act 2022 introduces significant new obligations. They must maintain a digital golden thread of safety information throughout the building’s lifetime, and demonstrate active, ongoing risk management. Failure to comply is not a regulatory grey area. It carries the potential for prosecution.
What connects all of this is documentation. A well-run digital inspection process that captures the condition of rooms, communal areas and shared spaces at regular intervals with photographs and timestamped records is not just good operational practice. It is the foundation of a building safety case. It is how a team demonstrates, when asked, that they have been paying attention.
A maintenance issue logged during an arrival inventory, automatically flagged for resolution and tracked through to completion, is more than a convenience. It is evidence that the building is being managed responsibly. In a sector where accountability for building safety is now personal as well as institutional, that kind of evidence matters.
What students actually expect now
There is a wider shift happening in the sector that universities are paying attention to, and in purpose-built student accommodation, the leading operators are already moving beyond the inspection as a back-office task.
Students are being given visibility of their inspection reports. Findings are shared through the channels students actually use. The inspection process is becoming a touchpoint for building trust and transparency rather than something that happens to a student without their knowledge. From maintenance checks and safety visits to kitchen cleans and mid-term inspections, as well as the usual pre-arrival inventory and vacating inspection, all these human touchpoints bode well for building relationships with residence teams and demonstrating a duty of care to provide a safe and well-maintained home.
Universities have not only the same opportunity but, given the depth and duration of the student relationship, a stronger reason to take it. A student living in university accommodation is not just a tenant. They are a member of the institution. The experience of that accommodation, including how they are treated during and after inspections, forms part of how they feel about their university experience.
When a student receives a clear, fair, photographic report of the condition their room was inspected in, disputes reduce. Satisfaction improves. The conversation shifts from adversarial to transparent. And when a student can log a maintenance issue during their arrival inventory and watch it get resolved within days, they start to understand that the institution takes its responsibilities seriously. That trust, once built, is hard to undermine.
The resource reality
University accommodation teams are not growing to match the complexity of what is being asked of them. The pressure to do more with the same headcount is a constant, and it is not going away.
The 2026 CUBO Annual Benchmarking Survey, researched and written in conjunction with The Russell Partnership Collection, reports;
“Sector-wide challenges persist regarding changing student recruitment in terms of fees and numbers, and operating costs. The findings this year demonstrate how institutions are delivering more with less. Cost margins are being controlled, yet deficits are increasing.” – CUBO & The Russell Partnership Collection
An inspection process that relies on manual data entry, paper forms, chasing signatures and re-keying information into a separate system is a significant tax on staff time. Multiply that across every room, every block, every intake cycle, and the hours add up fast. Those are hours that could be spent on the work that actually requires human judgment: pastoral conversations, complex maintenance issues, building genuine relationships with students.
Offline-capable tools that sync automatically, feed into a single record and give the whole team visibility of the same information in real time are not a luxury for well-resourced institutions. They are the practical minimum for teams trying to operate professionally within the constraints they have. And when that single record runs from arrival inventory through mid-term inspection to vacating check, the cumulative value compounds across every cycle.
This year 61 institutions participated in CUBO’s benchmarking survey, representing over 30% of all UK and Ireland universities. The report does well to provide sector ‘scene setting’, summarising that this year’s findings continue to present a strong portrayal of the sector and demonstrate the evolving pattern of higher education across the UK and Ireland.
“The data continues to show the pressures on the higher education sector with rising operational costs alongside low-level funding per student and lower international recruitment and continued limited growth in student applications. The ever-shifting pattern of student recruitment and increasing operating costs are significantly impacting the ability for institutions to cost–save. As such, 45% of providers forecast a deficit (increasing from 40% in 2023/24). “ – CUBO & The Russell Partnership Collection
The question worth sitting with
I am not going to pretend this is a neutral observation. I work for a company that builds inspection software for the higher education and student accommodation sector, and I believe in it because I have seen the difference it makes for the people doing the work.
I was a customer of Kinetic back in 2012 when the first iteration of KxInspections was built. It was created in conjunction with the organisation I was working for; a partnership to streamline the inspections process, reduce risk and to save time (and money). Introducing an automated system (14 years ago, this was groundbreaking tech!) to the inspections and deposit return process had never been done before. Fast-forward to 2026, and I’m working at Kinetic, seeing how KxInspections has transformed operations across the sector. However, on the flip-side, I’m also still seeing customers facing the same challenges I had over a decade ago, because they haven’t invested in their business systems.
“When we talk to accommodation teams, the thing we hear most often is not that they want better software. It is that they want the end of term to stop feeling like a crisis. They want control, and to use their time more effectively. That is what we set out to solve.” – Rob Johnstone, Head of Products, Kinetic
But strip that away, and the question stands on its own: if your inspection process came under scrutiny tomorrow, from a student dispute, a UUK compliance review, a Building Safety Act assessment, or a new Director of Accommodation asking why things are still done this way, how confident would you be in what you could show them?
For a lot of university accommodation teams, the honest answer is not as confident as they would like to be.
That is worth changing. Not because a piece of software will solve everything, but because the people running these services deserve tools that match the standard of work they are already trying to deliver. And because the students living in those buildings value knowing that someone is paying attention, with the right tools to ensure action.
Clare Ody is VP Brand and Partnerships at Kinetic, the software platform built for higher education, purpose-built student accommodation and hospitality. She is a speaker and mentor with Women in PBSA.
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