Lancaster University Homes: what approval means for your student house

What Bayt commits to as an approved landlord

We hold three separate commitments to three separate bodies: approved Lancaster University Homes landlord, member of the National Residential Landlords Association, and every tenant deposit protected through the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. Students are usually shown all three as a single badge row, so the table below sets out what each one actually covers.

Alongside those, every home we let is bills included — gas, electricity, water and high-speed fibre broadband, with TV licence support and laundry access where the property provides them — and repairs run through a ticket route for routine jobs and a phone route for anything urgent, answered within 24 hours. When you call, you get us, not a national call centre.

The checks accreditation does not do for you

Approval tells you something useful about the landlord. It tells you very little about the specific bedroom you are about to pay for. Run these checks yourself at every viewing, accredited or not — and take how readily they are answered as part of the answer.

• Ask to see the current gas safety record and the electrical installation condition report for that property.
• Check there are working smoke alarms on every storey and a carbon monoxide alarm in any room with a fuel-burning appliance.
• Ask whether the house needs an HMO licence and, if so, to see it.
• Look for damp: tide marks on skirting, musty smells, black mould in bathroom corners and behind furniture.
• Turn a radiator on in the bedroom you would take, and check the window locks and the front door.
• Ask which deposit scheme is used and when the prescribed information is issued.
• Ask how long the tenancy runs in weeks, and whether anything extra is charged over the summer.
• Ask how a repair is reported at 9pm on a Sunday, and who actually answers.

Verifying approval yourself, rather than taking it on trust

Accreditation is only worth something if it is real, and "we are university approved" is a sentence anyone can put on a website. The check takes a few minutes, and it is worth doing for any Lancaster landlord — us included.

Search Lancaster University's own accommodation pages for the accreditation route and confirm the landlord appears there, rather than relying on a badge image on their site. Ask how long they have been accredited and when it was last renewed; a confident landlord answers immediately. Then ask whether the specific property you are looking at is covered, because approval attaches to a landlord and their properties rather than to the whole market.

Lancaster's universities also run housing events during the year, which are a straightforward way to meet accredited landlords in person and ask those questions face to face before you commit to a viewing schedule.

What approval means for a parent or guarantor

Accreditation is often more useful to the person signing the guarantee than to the student signing the tenancy. A guarantor is being asked to underwrite a year of rent for a property they may never see, usually in a city they do not know, on the strength of a website and a single viewing.

What accreditation gives them is a third party. Someone other than the landlord has looked at how this business operates and has accepted it onto a scheme it can be removed from. That is not a guarantee about the specific house, and it should not stop a family asking to see the safety records and the tenancy before anyone signs — but it is a materially different starting position from an advert on a listings site. Ours are usually UK-based guarantors; if yours is not, say so early and we will look at it rather than saying no by default.

How accreditation fits into a Lancaster house search

Accreditation is a filter, not a decision. Use it early to narrow the field, then choose between the homes that survive on the things that shape your year: the total weekly cost with bills included, the real door-to-door journey to your campus, the balance of bedrooms if you are in a group, and how responsive the management actually is once the deposit has cleared.

For context on cost, our published Lancaster homes for 2026/27 run from £125 to £139 per person per week for a room in a shared house, and £229 per week for the self-contained North Road studio, bills included. Tell us your group size and year and we will tell you which of those homes are available and which are approved.