CHARLOTTE, N.C. — As the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, the 2025-2026 academic year moved further into focus. What can the industry expect to see this year from a preleasing perspective? Are rents expected to keep growing? And by how much? All of these questions and more were discussed during a kick-off panel at the 2024 LeaseCon/TurnCon conference by InterFace Conference Group, which took place this past December in Charlotte.
As of Dec. 3, student housing properties across the country were 36.6 percent preleased on average — a 1.3 percent decline from rates seen at the same time in 2023, according to moderator Charlie Matthews, founder and CEO of data provider College House.
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Of markets across the United States, the Southeast led the way with the highest preleasing percentage at 43.5 percent. Asking rents have congruently grown by 4.9 percent across the country as of early December, according to Matthews, with average rents at $990. Leading the way in rent growth for the 2025-2026 academic year is the Midwest with average rents rising by 7 percent.
While slightly slower preleasing rates don’t immediately draw a red flag, they do call into question what the industry can expect for the upcoming academic year. For Alex Rippy, vice president of leasing and systems with GMH Communities, it’s simply a matter of the adage slow and steady wins the race.
GMH Communities saw double-digit rent growth across its portfolio on average last year. The trend is still upward this year, according to Rippy, the process is just moving a bit slower and a lot of that has to do with this generation of residents.
“Students are really starting to slow down and make more executive decisions based on analysis of the product, value and what is really driving rents upward,” she said. “Leasing still looks great; it’s just a touch slower than last year. But slow and steady wins the race.”
And while this slower movement could radicalize the doom and gloom crowd, Jason Fort, executive vice president with Asset Living, notes that student housing has never looked better. “I think it’s a little funny because a lot of the time on industry calls, the student housing crew is lamenting that they’re behind where they were last year and it’s not as good,” he began. “Our multifamily team has 285,000 units that we manage across the country and they’re genuinely struggling.”
An issue that Jake Jarman, president of Redstone Residential, noted is not just anecdotal but is impacting student housing occupancy rates. “Multifamily did not do well last year, and because of that, they cannibalized some of my student population because it became cheaper to live off-site in a non-student-specific community,” he said.
“When the student housing industry is raising rents and occupancies are strong — why are we worried because we’re not getting 15 percent rent growth but we’re getting 8 percent and our industry occupancies are super strong,” questioned Fort. “The fundamentals have never been better. We’re going to raise rents, but we’re going to do it in tiers and we’re still going to be successful. Students need a place to live, deliveries are down and enrollments are up in Power Four schools. There’s never been a better time to be in student housing than right now.”
Capturing the student population
With multifamily properties poaching students from purpose-built communities, it’s more important than ever to understand the renter and their needs. “The cohort that is just coming in as freshmen were the COVID-19 freshmen in high school and they are a different renter,” said Jarman. “They rent differently, they talk differently and they interact differently because they went through a completely different high school experience than others have.”
Because of that, marketing towards these students must be different and the way that the industry tours with them and talks to them must be different, Jarman added. “This is not the same renter that you saw five or six years ago.”
This can be particularly challenging for developers that are bringing massive projects online, but this obstacle is not slowing down Core Spaces, according to Vice President of Sales and Leasing Jourdan Vartabedian. “When it comes to some of our new developments this year, we’ve tackled things a little bit differently,” she said.
“We’re building these really large buildings, so occupancy is going to be our number one focus and rent growth will come later,” added Vartabedian. “That’s how we’re approaching the 4,300 beds that we have under construction right now and we’re a little over 75 percent pre-leased to date. It all comes from getting into markets super early and focusing on occupancy and the resident experience.”
For Core Spaces, it all comes down to marketing the resident experience. “We had a Lee Brice concert at one of our properties recently, and we’re really focused on delivering on the promise that you will live a different lifestyle when you choose to live with us,” she said.
And while a new development can hit the ground running with branding and marketing, that isn’t always the best strategy when acquiring a new property and looking to win over a new student base, according to Devan Schaly-Brumbaugh, director of leasing and marketing with The Tailwind Group.
“We have had steady acquisition activity over the past couple of years and our strategy has changed a lot,” she said. “We would acquire a property and on day one, we would basically throw their playbook out the window and bring in a whole new rent strategy because with that rent strategy, we were bringing some capital expenditures, and we thought that would be enough to justify rent growth.”
What they’ve learned, however, is that it sometimes pays to consider inheriting the existing rent strategy, getting capital expenditures underway and being able to show what they’re doing with the property before introducing new rents that they think are going to be justified by the upgraded amenity package or creating bed-to-bath parity, she said.
“We’ve historically liked to buy up the tired four-by-two properties a little bit further from campus and introduce bed-to-bath parity, but we’re learning that — in some markets as rent growth starts to kind of hit a bubble — there are situations where students would be willing to sacrifice bed-to-bath parity in order to get the rate that they really need,” said Schaly-Brumbaugh.
Overall, market fundamentals are bright for the 2025-2026 academic year. Naysayers with a grim outlook need only stop searching for rose-colored glasses and take a closer look at the details behind industry performance, she added. “We’ve had unprecedented rent growth over the past couple of years, which is really exciting, but we can’t completely change the velocity of a given market,” Schaly-Brumbaugh said.
“I’ve had conversations where a property was 75 percent pre-leased by the end of November, and I’m getting the question why aren’t we at 85 percent? We’re always trying to outpace the year before with double-digit rent growth, but eventually we’re going to have to choose one or the other,” she added. “It comes down to the question of are you trying to get heads in beds faster and introduce rent growth later, or do you want to come out the gate with very clear and earnest rent growth and you’re willing to take your time in terms of getting heads in beds?”
— Katie Sloan