Student Housing as a Property Type

Student housing, the line of rental work in which Richard Joseph Spinelli’s company Sandhills Real Estate places groups of Fordham undergraduates in apartments and townhouses, is a category defined by its renters far more than by its architecture. Picture one two bedroom unit on a quiet street. Leased to a young couple with a child, it is conventional housing. Leased instead to two sophomores who split the bedrooms and share the kitchen, the identical rooms turn into student housing as far as lenders, analysts and census takers are concerned.

Fannie Mae’s multifamily guide supplies the most precise working definition. It calls a rental building a Student Housing Property when at least forty percent, but under eighty percent, of its units are leased to undergraduate or graduate students, and a Dedicated Student Housing Property once that share reaches eighty percent or more.¹ The guide adds that a dedicated property typically was constructed for students or, though built as ordinary multifamily housing, is now leased primarily to them.¹ Nothing in the definition requires a special floor plan. What moves a property into the category is the population inside it.

Where it parts from the ordinary apartment

The first difference is the tenant. A conventional apartment goes to a household that may stay for many years and whose income usually covers the lease on its own. A student unit goes to people whose presence in the neighborhood is tied to a school, whose earnings are often small, and who will graduate and leave. Fannie Mae makes the point in a small rule: a student who earns enough to cover the lease without help does not count toward the student share of a building.¹ The category, in other words, tracks dependence on a campus as much as age.

The second difference is the lease itself. Among the questions the guide tells a reviewer to ask are whether pricing is set by the unit or by the bed, whether the lease is signed by one tenant or by every tenant, and whether parents cosign.¹ A landlord leasing to working adults seldom meets any of those questions. Among student landlords they come up constantly, and each one has grown its own practice, from pricing by the bed to the parental guarantee.

The third difference is location. The same guide asks how close a property sits to campus and whether students can walk to class. For a dedicated property it sets firm limits: the school served must enroll at least 10,000 students, most of them full time, and the building must lie within two miles of a campus boundary or near a transportation line the school sponsors.¹ An ordinary apartment is judged against its whole metro area. A student building is judged against one institution, and its fortunes rise and fall with that school’s enrollment. The question of how many students a campus can house itself, and how many spill into the surrounding blocks, is taken up under off campus housing demand.

The fourth difference is the calendar. Fannie Mae requires that at least eighty percent of the units in a dedicated property be leased for a minimum term of twelve months, even though the academic year is shorter.¹ Leasing also runs far ahead of move in. In a January 2023 outlook, RealPage found close to 38 percent of tracked beds committed for fall 2023 as of the prior December, a record for that point in the calendar, with thirty of its 175 sampled campuses already past the halfway mark.² By the close of the season the figures climb much higher: Yardi Matrix put preleasing across the 200 schools it follows at 93 percent in August 2026 for the 2026 to 2027 year.³ A conventional landlord fills vacancies as they open. A student landlord fills a whole building for a date many months away, which is why the practice of pre leasing sits at the center of the business.

Finally, the product can be built for the purpose or simply adopted by students. The first kind, the purpose built complex with private bedrooms around shared living space, is what most people picture. The second kind, the ordinary houses and small buildings near a school that students happen to rent, is described under scattered site student housing. Both count as student housing because of who lives there.

How researchers and the census count it

Because the product behaves differently from ordinary rentals, the industry measures it apart. The National Multifamily Housing Council keeps a council devoted to student housing, a research fund, and a set of national and regional benchmarks whose metrics include the pre lease rate.⁴ Its 2025 income and expense survey gathered data from 16 student housing providers covering 719 properties, 144,149 units and 400,224 beds across 44 states.⁴ The ratio in those figures is telling. Beds outnumber units by close to three to one, a proportion that would make no sense in a survey of conventional apartments, where the unit and the household are the natural count.

Analysts also draw boundaries inside the student market. RealPage counts off campus purpose built beds on their own and leaves out both campus residence halls and a looser pool it labels the shadow market, meaning ordinary multifamily buildings, rented houses and Greek residences that students fill though nobody designed them for students.² That pool resists measurement, because the same building can hold students one year and a family the next.

Enrollment ties the two sides together. When a school grows, both purpose built and shadow housing fill; when it shrinks, the newest and most distant beds tend to feel it first. Yardi Matrix reported that enrollment at 38 schools that had released early fall 2026 figures rose 0.6 percent, slower than the 1.8 percent gain of fall 2025, with weaker international enrollment named as one concern.³ Where students live when campus halls fall short is compared in the entry on living on campus or off campus.

The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2024 that housing near campuses had become a hot corner of real estate even as high housing costs squeezed students, leaving some to choose cheaper windowless bedrooms in cities such as Austin.⁶ Multi Housing News described the sector entering 2026 with broad confidence, with new deals concentrated around top universities, markets short of beds and projects in walkable locations.⁷

The federal census offers perhaps the cleanest statement of the whole distinction. Students are counted where they live and sleep most of the time as of April 1.⁵ Those in campus residence halls, recognized fraternity and sorority houses, or off campus housing designed specifically for students, such as a privately owned apartment complex with individual student leases, are counted through the Group Quarters operation, the same process used for dormitories.⁵ Students who rent an ordinary apartment or house off campus are treated like any other household and must answer the census themselves rather than wait for the landlord.⁵ In that one rule the Census Bureau restates the definition this entry began with. A student complex is filed beside the dormitory, while two sophomores in a rented house are filed beside their neighbors.