We’re in the middle of a serious student housing crisis.

A flood of international students is colliding with a shortage in affordable housing. This has both been building for years – decades, even – but has come to a head in seemingly sudden and unexpected ways.

Students are paying the price. Some report having to sleep in their cars, couch-surf, or cram into a rental situation that requires sharing space with many other students in the same situation. All of this impacts these students’ abilities to persist and succeed.

Communities are paying the price. The impact of student housing shortages is showing up in neighborhoods near campuses where students take up housing that would normally go to those with fewer economic advantages.

And institutions are paying the price. When an increasingly large portion of their student body are struggling to put a roof over their heads, it spells disaster for student success and the merits of on-campus education (which are already facing as much scrutiny as they ever have).

Now is the time for schools to act.

If you’re thinking of building a new residence, renovating an existing housing facility or entering into a partnership with a private developer, the path to success starts with a flexible strategic analysis that ties the housing needs and financial capacities of your students into your overall enrolment strategy.

That’s where CRI comes in.

Our Home Away From Home study leaves you with simple, actionable, data-driven steps to take so that your housing projects are driven by the needs of students you plan to house and enrol.

We’ll also show you how you can use a custom-built interactive housing demand simulator to model different scenarios to explore which students will be drawn to various combinations of unit types, amenities and location and how those choices will impact your ability to generate needed revenues. Our studies also help you identify what kind of revenue forecasts you can expect in a range of cases.

Having data that's produced and given to the institution by a consultant that has some expertise in this field, like CRI … really helps when justifying a decision to stakeholders such as senior university executives, Boards of Governors and/or local or provincial governments to have that third-party lens on it, validating what you’re saying and benchmarking it against the rest of the industry.

—Andrew Parr, Associate Vice President of Student Housing and Community Services at the University of British Columbia

Our research follows a key principle: when it comes to student housing projects, identifying and aligning with student needs is everything.

For example: the needs of entering undergrads can be very different from those of upper year undergrad students. Building a new dorm with the goal of filling it with upper-year undergrad students is a non-starter. Barring unprecedented market forces, it’s unlikely enough upper-year undergrad students would be willing to live in dorm-style quarters to ensure the project’s financial success.

Whatever you do to build or renovate also has to fit within students’ financial capacities while offering opportunities to use the residence experience to build networks of new friends. CRI’s flexible interactive approach can show you how each possible scenario impacts your financials.

So, while many entering students dream of a private one-bedroom apartment with its own kitchen, bath and regular cleaning service only 5 minutes from classes, the economic and psychological realities are much different. First off, many students can’t afford what it would cost your institution to build and operate hundreds or thousands of one-bedroom units, and second, the university’s sense of community would likely implode.

Determining what can be built and leased is a key part of CRI’s services since 2010 – we’ve worked with every type of situation, from a single college with 180 full-time students to an entire province with almost 500,000 students.

CRI’s Home Away From Home helps you plan the most data-driven student housing project with the least amount of guesswork.

Grab us for a quick chat and we’ll show you how.