Distance to Campus in Student Housing

In the rental business Richard Joseph Spinelli helped start, Sandhills Real Estate, apartments and townhouses are leased to groups of Fordham students, and for any product of that kind the walk to class is among the first things a renter weighs. Student housing researchers treat that walk as a measurable variable. They draw rings around a campus, sort every tracked building into a ring, and report how quickly each ring fills for the coming fall. The picture that emerges is a gradient: the nearest rings lease first and fastest, the farthest lag, and the size of the gap widens or narrows with the strength of the year. This entry moves through the rings from the inside out.

Inside a quarter mile

Yardi Matrix reports a quarter mile ring, roughly a five minute walk, as its innermost band. In its September 2026 report on the Yardi 200 schools, properties inside that ring had reached 93.4 percent preleased by August for the 2026 to 2027 academic year.¹ Across the whole group the figure was 93 percent, so the closest buildings ran slightly ahead of the average even in a strong season.¹ RealPage reported in September 2024 that price follows the same gradient, with beds within a half mile of campus commanding a premium of about 9 percent in July 2024, much as in 2019, while beds more than a mile out came at a discount of about 19 percent.⁶

A quarter mile to a half mile

The next ring out barely differs. Yardi put buildings between a quarter mile and a half mile of campus at 93.2 percent preleased in August 2026.¹ Within about ten minutes on foot, in other words, students in 2026 treated the two rings as nearly interchangeable. Flatness of that kind near campus is what one would expect in a tight year, when nearly everything close has been claimed and the real contest takes place farther out.

Within a half mile

RealPage Market Analytics uses a coarser scale, with its inner band set at a half mile. In its report on the fall 2026 season, RealPage said 95.9 percent of the student housing beds it tracks had been leased by August, second only to the 96.5 percent record of fall 2025.² Communities inside the half mile band reached 96.1 percent.² The same inner band led early in an earlier cycle as well. Institutional Real Estate, Inc., reporting RealPage data, noted that in January 2024 the 175 core universities RealPage follows had nearly half their beds, 49 percent, claimed for the following fall, the highest January reading on record, and that the half mile band was ahead at 49.5 percent.³

The early reading matters as much as the final one. A building that fills by January has months to plan its turnover, while one that is still signing in July faces a scramble. The inner band tends to reach each milestone first, and the practice of signing so far ahead is explained under pre leasing.

Half a mile to a mile

In RealPage’s middle band, from a half mile to a mile, beds were 95.6 percent leased in August 2026.² In January 2024 the same band stood at 48.7 percent.³ A mile is roughly a twenty minute walk, and at that range buses, bicycles or cars often start to enter the calculation. Transit can stretch the rings: Forbes reported in August 2023 that the University of Tennessee signed a five year contract for 192 beds in an apartment complex five miles from campus, served by the school’s buses every 20 minutes on weekdays.⁷

Beyond a mile

Past one mile RealPage recorded 95.4 percent leased in August 2026 and 47.4 percent in January 2024.²³ The spread from the inner to the outer band was about two points in January 2024 and less than one point by August 2026. RealPage read the narrow 2026 gap as a sign that student demand was broad enough to fill a wide range of locations, not only those nearest campus.² In a year when nearly every bed is taken, distance mostly decides the order in which buildings fill; in a softer year it decides whether they fill at all.

Past two miles

The outermost ring shows what happens when demand thins. Yardi reported that buildings sited over two miles out stood at 88.7 percent preleased in August 2026, well behind the inner rings and 110 basis points behind the prior year.¹ Lenders draw a line at about the same place. Fannie Mae, in the student chapter of its lending guide, treats a building as a dedicated student property only if it lies no more than two miles outside the campus line drawn by the local municipality, unless a school sponsored route serves it.⁴ Its checklist for reviewers includes a plain question: can students walk to class and other campus locations?⁴ A building beyond two miles without a shuttle no longer qualifies as a dedicated student property for the lender and is judged as an ordinary apartment that students might rent. Multi Housing News reported in January 2026 that new projects were clustering around top tier universities in walkable locations, citing developments at Texas A&M planned within steps of campus.⁸

That boundary shapes where new projects go, as the supply ledger shows, and why purpose built complexes crowd the edges of large campuses. The same logic of walkability runs through scattered housing near older schools; the houses and apartments of Sandhills Real Estate, for example, sit within walking distance of Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus.

Minutes rather than miles

Distance bands measure buildings, but students experience distance as time. A survey of first year and second year students gives that time a consequence beyond convenience. The Association of College and University Housing Officers International, working with the National Survey of Student Engagement and drawing on 33,000 respondents at 76 residential institutions, found that sophomores who live more than ten minutes from campus are less likely to persist into the next year than those who live within ten minutes.⁵ The same research found that first year students living on campus returned for a second year at 92 percent, against 90 percent for those living independently off campus.⁵

The survey does not claim that distance alone causes students to leave; it attributes much of the on campus advantage to learning activities that take place where students live, from study groups to meetings with faculty.⁵ Still, the ten minute line sits close to the half mile band in the leasing data, and both suggest the same thing. The rings around a campus are not only a map of what students will pay for convenience. They are a rough map of how connected a student stays to the school. Whether residence shapes persistence is weighed further in the residence comparison. What sends students into the rings in the first place is the subject of off campus housing demand.