Unite Students
Turning student accommodation into a mobile-first experience
A new foundation for digital growth
Unite Students is the UK’s leading private student accommodation provider, partnering with 60+ universities and housing 70,000 students each year.
Its app was once an industry first, but years of legacy technology had made it expensive to maintain, difficult to scale and no longer reflective of the Unite brand or student experience. At the same time, the website—the business’s primary sales channel—needed to remove friction from the booking journey and improve conversion.
Unite Students partnered with Apadmi to rebuild both products. The goal: create a scalable digital platform that supports students from booking through move-in and beyond, while improving operational efficiency and driving more bookings.
The result was a complete rebuild that made Unite Students the highest-rated PBSA app within a year, then transformed the website that powers its booking funnel.
Discovery first, delivery at pace
The programme began with an in-depth discovery phase to identify technical constraints, understand student needs and align product priorities before a transformative product roadmap was agreed.
A future-ready app
Built in Flutter with a modern backend, the new app enables continuous improvement rather than fighting legacy architecture. Alongside the rebuild, data was cleaned and restructured to provide stronger analytics and insight.
Apadmi worked closely with Unite’s design, engineering and QA teams to embed mobile-first thinking and deliver both app and web experiences to WCAG AA standard.
Ready for peak season
Delivery was planned around September 2024’s critical intake period. An agile delivery approach, carefully managed migration and re-engineered authentication process ensured a seamless launch without disrupting students.
Supporting students
The result is an app that supports students throughout their journey—from connecting with future flatmates and booking check-in slots to raising maintenance requests, reporting lockouts and accessing support whenever they need it.
Results
Self-service has significantly reduced demand on customer support while improving the student experience.
The call centre received -24% traffic year-on-year, peaking at -54% in July. Noise complaint calls fell by 97% thanks to in-app reporting.
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30x
faster load times
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46K
peak monthly active users
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4.8*
iOS App Store rating
Transforming the booking journey
The website needed the same modernisation as the app. Built on legacy technology, it struggled to evolve despite being Unite’s primary revenue channel.
Apadmi helped build a new Backend for Frontend for web, introduced OpenSearch to power property search and implemented Contentful, allowing Unite’s teams to manage content independently.
Behind the scenes, data was reorganised and improved to strengthen analytics across both web and app.
Conversion optimisation that compounds
Following the rebuild, Apadmi ran CRO experiments to improve the booking journey.
Moving key value propositions above the fold on the homepage increased users entering the booking flow by 15%. On property pages, surfacing pricing, USPs and persistent CTAs reduced friction and increased booking flow entry by 10%.
Growth that scales
Today, Unite has a faster, more flexible digital platform across app and web. Students can self-serve more of their journey, reducing pressure on customer support while improving satisfaction. Students reported 81% positive check-in sentiment and NPS rose by 12 points in Autumn 2024 and 16 points in Spring 2025.
At the same time, Unite has strengthened its primary revenue channel, simplified rebooking and created a platform that can continue evolving with the business.
“Last Autumn, we launched a new version of our Student App and in just one year, it’s the highest-rated app in the PBSA market. It’s now central to how we support students every day—reducing contact centre demand, streamlining operations and improving the student experience. The growth in our NPS reflects that. We couldn’t have achieved it without Apadmi’s expertise and commitment to quality.”
– Ellie Drave, Senior Product Manager – App, Unite Students
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