Knight Frank projects India's purpose-built student accommodation sector could see demand from over 12 million students by 2035, as institutional investment in APAC's living sector nearly triples to $21 billion.
Institutional investors have been quietly building conviction in a corner of real estate that doesn't get nearly the attention office towers or luxury housing do. Investment in the Asia-Pacific living sector, which covers student housing, co-living and senior living, has nearly tripled over the past decade, climbing to $21 billion between 2016 and 2025, according to a new Knight Frank report. India's purpose-built student accommodation segment is being flagged as one of the strongest long-term opportunities within that broader trend.
The numbers behind this are genuinely large. India currently has around 155 million people in the 18-23 age bracket, with close to 53 million already enrolled in higher education. The government's own target of a 50% Gross Enrolment Ratio would push the tertiary student population past 70 million by 2035. Layer in Knight Frank's estimate that education drives 15-17% of all interstate migration in India, and the report arrives at a striking figure, potential accommodation demand from more than 12 million students within the next decade.
Two forces are pushing this from opposite directions. Stricter visa rules abroad and the rising cost of overseas education are prompting more Indian students to study domestically rather than look overseas. At the same time, leading international universities are increasingly setting up offshore campuses within India itself, which Knight Frank expects to further boost demand for professionally managed accommodation, not the informal hostel and PG setups that have historically absorbed most student housing demand.
Shishir Baijal, Knight Frank India's Chairman and Managing Director, framed the opportunity around a specific combination, strong demographics, an expanding higher education ecosystem, and increasing student mobility, all pointing toward sustained demand for purpose-built accommodation. His read is that this combination should pull in greater institutional capital and support genuinely high-quality development, rather than the ad hoc rental housing that's dominated the segment until now.
Worth being upfront about the near-term picture, institutional capital allocated to APAC's living sector did rise 12% in 2025, even as overall real estate fundraising fell 5.9% that same year. But investment in the living sector specifically dropped nearly 10% year-on-year during H1 2026. Knight Frank still expects transaction activity to pick up through the rest of the year, driven by the same demographic and mobility trends supporting co-living and senior housing alongside student accommodation, but it's a genuinely mixed picture right now, not a straight upward trajectory.
Delhi-NCR's university cluster sits heavily along the Greater Noida belt, Amity University, Sharda University, Galgotias, and Bennett University are all within a short drive of Sector 150 and the Noida Expressway corridor, and they collectively pull in a large share of the interstate student migration Knight Frank is pointing to. That's a real boon for anyone holding rental property nearby, a dense university cluster like this tends to keep rental demand structurally higher than in areas without one, students and their families are a steady, recurring source of tenants regardless of broader market cycles.
Hommea sees this as one more reason projects around Greater Noida tend to hold rental appeal beyond just the immediate resident base, family buyers and a steady undercurrent of student-linked demand from the surrounding university corridor both feed into the same rental market.
