For letting and estate agents
Your landlords are asking about Universal. Here’s the answer.
We built the distance, rent and commute model for all 58 areas around the Kempston Hardwick site. Use it with your landlords. List your room and HMO stock with us for free while you’re at it.
Why we’re worth ten minutes
Rooms and HMOs are usually the least profitable, most time-consuming corner of a lettings book. Meanwhile a five-year construction programme is arriving on your patch with a workforce that needs precisely that stock.
We are not asking you to move your business. We are offering to fill the annoying part of it, for free, from an audience that is already searching for exactly what you have and landing on our pages instead of yours.
And we would rather be straight with you: we are early. We will tell you our real traffic numbers when we talk, not a made-up figure on a landing page.
What signing up actually gets you
Free listings
Room, HMO and house-share stock across Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes. Free for the founding cohort indefinitely, and never retroactively charged.
Distance-to-site badge
Real miles and drive time from Kempston Hardwick on every listing, computed from coordinates. Plus a flag for the areas with a direct train to the site.
Pre-qualified enquiries
Renters arrive having already read the area page — commute, rent band, how scarce stock is. Fewer time-wasting calls to your branch.
The market brief
Our Bedfordshire room market data: rents and supply by area, distance banding, commute analysis. Co-brandable for your landlord conversations.
The part nobody else can offer
We also run the jobs side
Room Rent is one of three connected sites. The others cover recruitment for the Universal build and the wider Bedford picture around the resort.
That matters to you for one specific reason: we see the worker before they need the room. Someone who has just accepted a role on a five-year construction programme is about as good a tenant covenant as Bedfordshire has to offer, and they arrive with a start date rather than a maybe.
No portal competing with you for room stock has the employment side of that equation.
How the network runs
- Worker finds the jobRole and qualification pages on our recruitment site.
- Worker needs a roomSent straight here, already knowing the area and the commute.
- Enquiry hits your branchEmployed, contracted, and clear on what they are looking at.
- You fill low-margin stockThe corner of the book that usually sits there.
- Universal Workers — Jobs and recruitment for the Universal UK build.
- Universal Guide Bedford — Everything happening in Bedford around the resort.
Register your agency
No commitment and no contract. Tell us who you are and what you hold, and we’ll come back to you with our actual numbers so you can decide whether it’s worth your time.
Letting agents: common questions
- Are you competing with Rightmove or SpareRoom?
- No, and we would rather say so upfront. We cover one niche — rooms, HMOs and house shares within commuting distance of one construction site — for one demand event running to 2031. Keep your stock everywhere it already is. This is an additional channel aimed at a specific audience, not a replacement portal.
- What does it cost?
- Nothing, and nothing for the founding cohort indefinitely. We need supply and liquidity far more than we need listing fees. If we introduce paid placement later it will be optional, clearly priced, and it will never apply retroactively to agents who signed up early.
- What stock are you actually interested in?
- Rooms in shared houses, HMO rooms, house shares, studios and annexes across Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes. Typically the lowest-margin, highest-hassle part of a lettings book — which is exactly the part we are offering to fill for you.
- How do enquiries reach us?
- Straight to your branch, with your branding on the listing. We are not an intermediary, we do not hold deposits or rent, and we do not take a cut. Enquiries arrive already knowing the distance to the site, the commute and the rent band, because the area page told them before they clicked.
- What is the distance-to-site badge?
- Every property carries the real distance and approximate drive time from the Universal construction site at Kempston Hardwick, calculated from coordinates rather than guessed. We also flag which areas have a direct train to the site on the Marston Vale line. No general portal shows this, because no general portal is built around one location.
- How many people are actually looking?
- The build runs to 2031 and needs around 20,000 construction workers, then roughly 8,000 permanent staff. Universal has pledged around 80 per cent local hiring across Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes. We will share our actual search and enquiry numbers with you directly rather than quote a figure here we cannot stand behind.