How Student Housing's Bringing Sexy Back

SMU's mammoth student housing project included 1,300 beds across five new residence halls along with the upgrade of six existing ones. The project, which took almost five years to complete, opened this fall with the student move-in, says SMU dean of residence life and student housing Troy Behrens (here with his bowling team in training, ages 6, 7, and 8). Starting in 2014, all students are required to live on-campus for their first two years, so the university needed to expand to accommodate that requirement, Troy says. Today, SMU can house 3,200 students (which is about 51% of the undergraduate population). 

The new spaces feature more common areas and Wi-Fi throughout to bring students out of their rooms to interact with one another. Troy says studies show that if a student feels a sense of belonging, it keeps them connected to campus and their grades improve. Student retention rates also increase, and many students can avoid the sophomore slump because they don't feel lost in the system.

Residence halls today are more about living and learning environments and less a place simply to lay your head at night, Troy says. (Pictured is student move-in day this fall.) Another relatively new concept at SMU is the faculty-in-residence for the student housing facilities. Faculty members and their families (including Fido and Fluffy) live in the residence hall, providing a more family-like atmosphere. It allows the students to form connections with professors and feel less homesick, too. To learn more about these exciting projects, please joine us for our statewide Texas Student Housing Summit on Sept. 23 at the Hyatt Regency Austin.

American Campus Communities CIO William Talbot (an esteemed panelist at our Texas Student Housing Summit) has been involved in more than 130 property acquisitions totaling over $4B in the last 13 years at ACC, including the three largest transactions ever done in the sector. Not bad for a man who just stumbled upon the student housing industry. William started his real estate career handling acquisitions with Lend Lease in 1997, and it gave him a taste of the full gamut of real estate—except student housing. In 2001, he and his future wife wanted to move to Austin, but there were very few real estate jobs available. He found ACC from a blind ad on Monster.com and gave it a go, despite knowing almost nothing about student housing.

William tells us ACC has been “building for the masses, not the classes” by building on campus or within 10 minutes' walk to campus, max, but still with a value proposition. Take Texas A&M's UCentre at Northgate (pictured), one of the $232M of developments ACC delivered for Fall 2014. It's a $100 to $225 discount to adjacent new properties, which gives it lots of room to grow rents in future leasing cycles. William's also particularly proud of Callaway House at UT Austin, a unique 753-bed property that includes residence hall-style units with food service that compete directly with campus dorms. Despite being newer and more highly amenitized than the on-campus product, ACC was able to deliver it at a discount and has seen significant demand.

Pictured: Pros from ACC (can you spot William?) at its original IPO opening bell ringing ceremony (August 2004) and closing bell ceremony celebrating its tenth anniversary as a public company (this month). William tells us ACC owns 29 properties (topping 17,500 beds) in nine Texas collegiate markets, and would like to grow within those areas. Outside of work, he mostly has been spending time with his eight-year-old and five-year-old kids. He likes to golf (but is terrible at it) and wants to collect vinyl records, but hasn't found time to buy a turntable yet.

Building a university—and its student housing component—from scratch would be a challenge in itself, but Campus Advantage biz development and consulting services VP Jonathan Bove and the CA team did it in Russia. Jonathan (here at St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow and who'll be speaking at our Bisnow's Texas Student Housing Summit) just returned from six months in Vladivostok, where he worked with Russia's Ministry of Education on the newly created Far Eastern Federal University (which opened in fall 2013). In addition to helping design a student residence life component, Campus Advantage even helped the university adopt a mascot —the Dragons—and set up merchandising to promote the school.

Jonathan says the university already had a student activities office, but no residence life programs. So they worked together to set up that office and assisted in recruiting resident assistants (an RA teambuilding exercise pictured), as well as setting up best practices for auxiliary services, career services, and food services, among others. Campus Advantage also advised on how to enhance residence life and the student atmosphere, as well as planning events and activities both inside and outside of the residence halls. 

Because all of this was new, Jonathan's team and the university leaders were establishing traditions that students will experience for years come, he tells us. Helping support international students while living abroad gave the CA team a much deeper appreciation for the need to support international students who study here in the US, too, Jonathan tells us. He says the cultural immersion is an experience he won't soon forget. He left his mark, too: Pictured is Jonathan and the American football club team (The Wild Pandas) that he coached while he was there. He also learned how to make a great borscht, even exchanging recipes with the Ukraine-born cabbie who picked him up at the airport upon his return trip.