Student Housing’s Best, Worst Markets via Multifamily Executive Magazine

Real estate investors have increasingly focused on the student housing industry in search of more yield. Interest has been so intense, in fact, that questions have arisen about whether the industry is starting to overheat.

The sector runs the gamut from privately owned and managed off-campus housing to on-campus housing in some form of public–private partnership to university-owned and -managed dormitories. Additionally, from a market perspective, the sector competes with both conventional apartments in proximity to a university as well as the “shadow market,” the single-family rentals or “student slums” close to a university.

One of the reasons for heightened investor interest is the wave of Echo Boomers, or Gen Y, the largest generation in our nation’s history, which is expected to increase college enrollments—and, thus, bed demand­—by at least 10 percent by 2016.

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