I'm a first year and I've been hit with a bit of a complicated situation. I'm in quite a big group of friends and we organised different house groups earlier this semester. No problems there but eventually someone was planning to drop out of uni from my group specifically, which kind of messed up our plans as we didn't know if they were actually going to or not. Eventually someone else had to leave our group due to other circumstances, and that kind of killed any drive for me to make an effort to look for houses. It was down to 2 people, meaning we'd likely have to look for other people that we don't know very well to live with for a year.
As time passed I was weighing up the pros and cons of halls vs shared house, and halls looked to be better (for me) in quite a few aspects besides socially. Having to pay for a 52 week contract for houses was really unattractive to me (money is tight), dealing with bills, and potentially bad landlords. Idk, I just feel like 2 months into the first semester is soooo early to start thinking about a huge commitment and take on a lot of risks.
The biggest thing that I'd be missing out on is the social aspect of living in a shared house, and if the complications I mentioned above didn't happen, I probably wouldn't have even considered halls again. Now I'm in a situation where most people I know have sorted out their housing, and I feel like its too late to try get a nice house that's good value for money, having to find multiple other people to live with and book viewings and such. It's looking more attractive to save myself the hassle and just live in halls again.