Franklin Street Expands Into Student Housing, Picking Up Former Marcus & Millichap Team
Franklin Street is pushing into student housing, scooping up an eight-person team to launch the new vertical for the Tampa-based real estate firm.
A Marcus & Millichap team led by Patrick Mullowney and Joel Dumes is heading over to Franklin Street to launch the firm's student housing arm. The team consists of five sales professionals and three support staff who will focus on institutional transactions over $25M, according to a release.
“We have ambitious goals, but we see opportunity in the current market and, with Franklin Street’s dynamic platform, we’re confident we’ll find success together,” Mullowney, who is coming to the firm as a senior director, said in a statement.
Dumes will join as a managing director.
The team is launching from Cincinnati, where it was previously based, marking Franklin Street’s entry into the market and expanding the firm's presence to seven states. The new student housing team has a national reach — having recently closed two deals totaling $125M in Gainesville, Florida, and Berkeley, California — that it plans to grow.
The new student housing arm is Franklin Street’s largest acquisition since the firm’s inception in 2006. It will be part of the institutional services group, which also includes Franklin Street's multifamily and self-storage teams. The student housing team is targeting large deals with more than 350 beds and expects to close more than $1B in transactions over the next several years.
The student housing team saw success at Marcus & Millichap as the Dumes Teets Mullowney Group, which closed 575 transactions totaling more than $2B across 26 states, according to a promotional page on its former brokerage’s website.
In addition to Dumes and Mullowney, the other team members moving to Franklin Street are brokers Kyle Teets, Seth Rosin and David Peirce, plus analysts and coordinators Jacob Bobo, Lauren Bounsall and Jake Westgerdes.
Student housing has become a popular alternative asset for investors looking for commercial real estate exposure due to strong fundamentals, growing demand, and the sector’s outperformance of the broader multifamily market in recent years.
The sector saw $6B in total sales volume in 2023 after a record $23B in transactions the year prior. The average capitalization rate on a student housing sale in 2023 was 6%, 60 basis points higher than traditional market-rate multifamily, according to Berkadia.
The brokerage ranked the University of Cincinnati, located in the same city as the new Franklin Street team, as the fastest-growing flagship university in the country in 2023.
Newmark also boosted its student housing presence in August by poaching Jeff Groff from CBRE, where he had spent 16 years. He joined as part of a team that is expanding Newmark’s multifamily presence.
“Long touted for its ability to remain resilient amid periods of economic softness, the student housing sector has largely proven its core thesis of resiliency in the post-pandemic era,” researchers wrote in the annual PwC and Urban Land Institute Emerging Trends report released this week.
