The season that started in a ditch and finished on the podium
Let’s rewind to December. Fall 2026 preleasing opened at the slowest pace in over a decade. The group chats were grim. Somebody used the word “correction” with a straight face.
Fast forward to move-in. College House preleasing hit 90.3% in July, a full 100 bps ahead of where last year finished the same month, and above the prior two years. Enrollment is up again.
Hot take #1: Student housing is the only asset class that can trail for eight months and still cover the spread. Stop panicking in January. The kids always show up in August.
Rent: flat is the new up
Advertised rent has been parked at $930 per bed for six straight months. Year-over-year growth crawled up to 2% in July.
That’s not a typo and it’s not a disaster. It’s the market admitting something operators already knew: renters figured out the game. Push rate early, cut rate late to fill beds. Residents now wait you out. The early-bird premium is dead. Long live the June discount.
Hot take #2: If your pro-forma still has 4% rent bumps baked in, you are underwriting 2023. Reset it. Your lender already has.
Scoreboard
The Midwest is running the table. Region leader at 90.9% preleased, up 230 bps. Iowa and Northern Arizona were matching last year’s final occupancy back in May. Virginia Tech, Missouri, Penn State and Boise State were within striking distance before summer even started. Boring schools. Boring markets. Boring 98% occupancy.
The Yardi 200 in one line: 117 markets at or above last year, 35 of them more than 10 points ahead, 20 already at 99%+. Then the other side: 25 markets at least 10 points behind, 35 still under 80%.
Hot take #3: The spread between top and bottom is the widest we’ve seen, and it’s not closing. Nor will it ever. This is no longer one market. It’s two. Underwrite accordingly.
The Winners’ Circle (sold out, sorry!)
| Market | July Preleased | The Story |
| Western Carolina | 99.8% | A 12,000-student school in the mountains just out leased the entire Yardi 200. Again. |
| Central Michigan | 99.4% | Nobody’s building here. That’s the whole thesis. |
| Maryland | 97.9% | Big flagship, D.C. money, no pipeline. Easy. |
| Virginia Tech | 95.5% in March | Led the country before spring break. Blacksburg is a leasing machine. |
Honorable mentions: Missouri and James Madison were both 88.4% by March. Penn State hit 87.3% and Clemson 85.2% before finals week. Iowa and Northern Arizona were matching last year’s final occupancy by May. Boise State and Auburn kept showing up on the leaderboard all spring, and Auburn posted the strongest rent growth of any large market at 7.6%.
Look at that list again. Not one of them is a “hot” market. No skyline. No mega-pipeline. No cranes. Just enrollment growth, tight supply, and a campus you can walk across.
Hot take #4: The best student housing market in America is a mid-major with one road into town and a city council that hates developers. Buy boring. Boring is 99% leased.
The Struggle Bus (all aboard)
| Market | July Preleased | vs. Last Year |
| Delaware | 71.1% | -16.3 pts |
| NC State | 78.5% | -15.9 pts |
| Purdue | 81.4% | -10.3 pts |
| Arizona State | 81.9% | -8.1 pts |
Three of those four have big pipelines still coming. Baylor rents are back to June 2022 levels. North Texas rent per bed is the lowest since August 2023.
None of this makes them bad markets, it makes them mispriced ones. Dislocation is where the next basis gets set, and it’s why we’re already having conversations in several of them.
Hot take #5: “Big school, tons of supply, everybody loves it” is not a thesis. It’s a crowd. NC State and Purdue were the darling schools two cycles ago. Now they’re where the repricing is happening which is exactly where patient capital starts hunting. Whoever is still building at ASU or University of Oregon is either very brave or very well capitalized.
The international story nobody’s underwriting yet
International enrollment is down. A four-year cap on F-1 status is now live. Grad PLUS loans ended in July, so a master’s student can borrow less and rent less. Guess which markets lean hardest on international grad students? Arizona, ASU, Michigan, North Texas. Guess which markets are on the struggle bus above.
Hot take #6: This is the biggest demand shift in student housing since COVID, and most BOVs treat it as a footnote. If your market has 15%+ international share, your Fall 2027 preleasing curve is not going to look like your Fall 2025 curve. Model it now or try to explain it later.
What the buyers are doing
Cap rates are roughly 50 bps wider at minimum than a year ago. Cross-border capital has basically left the building. Deal volume in the first half was thin because everyone was busy watching the leasing curve instead of buying.
Hot take #7: The window is right now. Occupancy just printed. Rents are stable. Sellers who priced to 2024 have had a long summer to think about it. The next 90 days are where deals get done before the next preleasing season resets everyone’s optimism.
Where GREA is putting beds in play
Enough scoreboard. Here’s where GREA is active right now. Some of these have a listing live today, others are markets where the leasing velocity is strong enough that we’re already working them and hunting the right deal to match. If you own in any of these, that’s the conversation to start:
Gainesville, FL (University of Florida). #7 public school in the country, 57,000+ students, applications up 24%. UF keeps admitting more Gators than it can house and Gainesville keeps absorbing whatever gets built. Windsor Hall sits on Sorority Row, walkable to campus and The Swamp: 114 units, 200 beds, purpose-built, 99% to 100% leased with 5% rent growth. Rooms are up to 60% bigger than the UF dorms and closer to class than most of them. Interiors and utilities are the value-add, and zoning allows for more beds. Not a 700-bed high-rise with a rooftop pool. Smaller basis, same demand engine. Call for offers: October 9. Check out Windsor Hall!
Tallahassee, FL (Florida State). 45,000+ students, applications through the roof, and a national profile climbing the public rankings every cycle. FSU turned selective fast and Tallahassee demand followed. Sunbelt enrollment growth and a campus that fills every walkable bed. The big-flagship trade that still works and the velocity here says the next deal is a matter of when, not if.
San Diego (SDSU). The most supply-constrained campus in the West, full stop. SDSU has been over-enrolled against its bed count for a decade and the city has no interest in fixing that. Ask us about a development site we are marketing in a very supply-constrained market.
Huntsville, TX (Sam Houston State). Full disclosure: Yardi flagged Sam Houston as a slow starter this spring. We agree. That’s the point. Bearkat Cottages, actively listed is a $8.25M cottage-style asset in a market where nobody is building and preleasing catches up every August. Late-leasing markets scare institutional money. They shouldn’t scare you.
Corvallis, OR (Oregon State). OSU keeps growing 29 straight years of enrollment growth and the university’s own housing plans are years out. Shadow Hills is 72 units OSU-adjacent, relaunched with a sharpened price after the first go-round. We firmly believe that Jensen Huang (OSU grad of 1984) will continue to donate to the school and OSU will be THE AI flagship school on the national level.
Eugene, OR (University of Oregon). UO announced a decline in enrollment earlier this summer. Enrollment is choppy, the pipeline is heavy, but we’re strong believers in the market long term. There’s too much not to like about this market. We’re working on several proposals and BOV’s in this market at the moment.
Syracuse, NY (Syracuse University). ~22,000 students, a private flagship, and a housing stock that winter won’t let anyone expand. Nobody breaks ground on a spec when the ground is frozen five months a year. Supply stays tight by default. Walk-to-campus product carries a hard premium when it’s 12 degrees and the Dome is the warmest room in town. Cold-weather barrier to entry is the most underrated moat in the sector, and we’re active here.
Philadelphia, PA (University of Pennsylvania). Ivy in a major metro, ~28,000 students, and land in University City that pencils for almost nothing else. Barriers to entry don’t get taller than West Philly – you’re bidding against hospitals and lab space for every parcel. Heavy grad and international share are the lines to underwrite honestly (see hot take #6), but the demand floor under an Ivy doesn’t move. We know this market forwards and backwards. We know these blocks cold and we’re watching every trade on them.
Philadelphia, PA (Temple University). Full disclosure: Temple’s enrollment took a real hit this decade, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. That’s the setup, not the disqualifier. North Broad keeps densifying, the commuter-to-resident shift is real, and purpose-built beds near campus still lease. Everyone wrote this market off two years ago. Which is exactly when the boring money starts circling. We’re one of the few paying attention.
Ithaca, NY (Cornell). Reread hot take #4, then look at Ithaca. Ivy enrollment, ~26,000 students, one real road into town, gorges on every side, and a city that has never once made building easy. Textbook tight-supply flagship. The moat is geography and zoning, and neither is getting friendlier. If “buy boring, boring is 99% leased” had a poster child, it lives in Tompkins County.
Hot take #8: The smartest capital in the room is buying campus-adjacent product where supply can’t chase demand — secondary flagships in the West and South, tight-supply Ivies and privates in the Northeast — while everyone else fights over the same 20 markets.
Want the OMs, or just want to compare notes on a market before there’s a deal on the table? Get in touch with our team here!
The Bed Count bottom line
Fall 2026 was a good year that felt like a bad year until it wasn’t. Occupancy strong, rents flat, supply lumpy, demand quietly shifting under the surface.
Winners: Midwest, mid-majors with no cranes, tight-supply flagships, anyone who stopped chasing rate in March.
Losers: Pipeline-heavy markets, international-heavy markets, and anybody who still thinks preleasing in January predicts anything.
Reply and tell us where we’re wrong. We read every one. If you’re headed to NMHC in Scottsdale and we don’t already have a meeting on the books, let’s get that scheduled now.