Unique Security Risks of Student Tenants and How to Deal with Them

Being a landlord to student tenants has its own benefits and rewards. You’re providing a home for the most reliable rental demographic and you’re almost guaranteed a constant supply of willing tenants. However, it also comes with its own risks. Here are the problems you can expect to encounter and how to deal with them.

Too Much Key Trust

Students will treat your accommodation like their own home. It is in many ways and you want them to do so. At home, they are usually free and easy with giving the key to friends and family to let themselves in while they are out. When they do this in their student’s accommodation they increase the security risk, increase the chances of keys getting lost and therefore increased the risk of burglary too.

How to deal with it: insist that they never pass keys to people who do not have the authority to hold one. This includes close friends and partners.

Leaving Windows Open When Nobody is at Home

If your student tenant comes from a rural area, they may think nothing of leaving the house with all the windows open. They’ve become used to having little in the way of burglary threat in the country. They may not understand the unique risks of urban living, even in safe towns and cities and safe parts or urban centres.

How to deal with it: Perhaps compile a security procedure document about ensuring that doors are locked and windows closed before the last student to leave departs the building.

No Night Time Routine

With anything up to five individual students in the house, it’s likely that each tenant will assume that everyone else is/has already checked the windows and locked the doors before going to bed. A slightly open window is a security risk, as is an unlocked door. Although burglars will not take unnecessary risks, it’s best not to enable them to decide whether it’s worth opening that window.

How to deal with it: Ask student tenants to consider the division of labour and setting up a routine for the night time lock up, checking windows and doors and securing exterior gates and outbuildings.

Valuables Left in Clear View

Students can be messy – in fact, most are messy. One major security concern (especially for those students with a room at ground level and no net curtain) is leaving valuables on display. A laptop on a table in front of the window, smartphones in clear view and a bedroom that looks like a veritable shop full of free stuff is a major security risk. All burglars need to do is scope the building to figure out when students are most likely to be out.