FALL UPDATE year, resulting in rental revenue growth ex-ceeding 9 percent. “Ultimately we were able to drive an excellent fi nish to the lease-up with signifi cant leasing activity continuing into August and September, which allowed us to increase our guidance midpoint by 4 percent,” says Beese. Leasing numbers were also stronger than last year at Cardinal Group. “We were ahead of 2019 across our portfolio, which was a great year, so we’re kind of seeing a full rebound,” says O’Brien. “Because leasing this year was stronger — and stronger earlier — we had room to start pushing rents again, which was impossible to do in most cases during 2020. Across the whole commercial real estate indus-try, student is looking like the belle of the ball again — very resilient even against a global pandemic.” Despite these stronger leasing numbers, un-certainty still remained in certain university markets. “Students defi nitely waited until the last minute to lease at many of our communi-ties,” says Brittany Pieper, director of leasing and marketing at Capstone On-Campus Man-agement (COCM). “There was a lot more hesi-tation and we leased later in some of our mar-kets. But there’s nothing cookie cutter about COCM, so a few of our markets leased very ag-gressively and were full before we anticipated.” And the outlook is even brighter for the 2022-2023 academic year, according to Petersen. “For us, leasing is off to a fantastic start and velocity is signifi cantly better than for fall of 2021,” he says. “As you might imagine, last year at this time there was still a great deal of uncertainty about when and if schools were going to re-open. As a result, the leasing curve was signifi -cantly later than in years past, and much of the leasing season was condensed into the second semester. For fall 2022, there does not seem to be any uncertainty from a university per-spective, and when you couple that with fewer new supply deliveries, students appear to be much more motivated to make their leasing decisions earlier. We think this is a good thing and hope that it continues through the fall and spring.” CASEY PETERSEN COO, Outlook PeakMade Real Across the sector Estate the outlook is opti-mistic for the year ahead in student hous-ing. “On a relative basis, student housing per-formed very well throughout the pandemic, and all signs point to its ability to continue to deliver outsized results compared with other asset classes,” says Petersen. “The capital mar-kets have taken notice as well and we believe that interest will continue to fuel the next phase of growth and maturation in the sector.” “I think there is going to be a lot of transac-tion volume in this upcoming year,” agrees O’Brien. “The buying window is open for groups in student housing and I also expect to see continued consolidation in the industry. Overall we expect a strong performance year. Many developments were put on hold for CO-VID, so we should see an even stronger year than this year in 2022.” O’Brien doesn’t, however, think the industry is out of the woods yet with supply chain is-sues. “We are working to really get ahead of turn this year,” he says. “Generally we’ll do a certain degree of unit inspection and order needed items in advance, but we’re pushing that timeline up even more. Our 2022 turn is starting right now. We have to be way more proactive and plan to make sure we’re account-ing for these delays that will impact us again next year.” SHB Student Loan Debt is a Crisis. We’re helping our team pay down their student loans, so they’re focused on managing your properties, not their debt. Contact us for Full Service Property Management www. varsitycampus .com 50 September/October 2021 StudentHousingBusiness.com
Student Housing Business September/October 2021: Page 50
