Baltimore: Grad Students Sign Apartments at the Buzzer
Grad students may be less likely to roll a keg down the stairs, but there is one way they're riskier for student housing owners than the Animal House guys. EdR's Jeff Resetco, who's speaking at Bisnow's Baltimore Higher Education & Student Housing Summit on Jan. 30, tells us grad students often don't know where they'll be studying until the spring, and that means waiting to sign apartment leases.
So for EdR, East Baltimore Development, and Otis Warren’s 321-unit, 572-bed 929 Apartments at 929 N Wolfe St, which targets Johns Hopkins grad students, that means doing most of the marketing at housing fairs and open houses when potential grad students are in town and then locking down leases later. It worked: The property is 95% leased (and remember that occupancy is static for a year in student housing). For more traditional student housing projects, Jeff says, some of EdR’s properties already are full for the 2014/’15 school year and it’s started leasing some for fall 2015. And he’s not worried about leasing for EdR’s 605 West JV with Javelin 19 Investments near Duke in Durham, NC (rendered above), as the $46.1M, 386-bed project is the only student-housing in the area.
