Student Housing Income: Replacing Guesswork with Science

In recent weeks, we’ve brought you a series of articles about new executive software tools that can help you squeeze maximum profit from your student housing assets – without any special technical expertise. These tools tap into the data your computer systems are already collecting day in and day out, along with deep market research, to deliver powerful insights that replace guesswork with science. They’re designed to help executives like yourself make more accurate business decisions, and are already being used by many owners and operators to consistently outperform their market peers.

In particular, these exciting tools can improve your precision in answering the following questions:

1. Where should I invest?

2. How are my properties performing?

3. How can I maximize my properties’ performance?

The series began with an article on optimizing student housing assets for maximum ROI. This explained the power of software tools to blow away the spreadsheets and simplistic KPI measurements of the past. Operators are given a lens into property markets and performance without special training or knowledge.

We continued with a look at revenue management software, which balances supply, demand and market criteria to suggest the ideal price to ask for each bed, every day. While revenue management is already a must-have to compete in other hospitality-related businesses, it’s been adopted more slowly in student housing due to a misconception that student is somehow “different” due to its seasonal nature. But it’s not – and the proof is in the growing performance edge properties using revenue management are attaining over those still using intuition and experience only, without the science.

Next, we reviewed AXIOStudent – the go-to source for deep market data for owners, investors, developers, lenders, operators and vendors in the student space. With a research staff devoted 100% to the student market, AXIOStudent collects more information on more universities and markets than any other source, from market-wide down to the floor plan and bed level. This data is invaluable in investment analysis and performance projections. And it can save you weeks collecting data yourself (or paying others to do it), allowing you to spend your time looking at more deals instead of assembling and interpreting information about them.

Finally, we covered business intelligence (BI) software, which lets you instantly see whatever data is important to you in your particular job, presented exactly the way you want it. Gone are the days of waiting days or weeks for reports and spreadsheets to be pulled together, only to leave you straining to view the data as meaningful information that helps you make better decisions. Now, at the click of your mouse, you can view colorful charts, graphs and reports that keep you on top of the KPIs that impact your job.

The overarching benefit of these new technologies is empowerment. Executives in the student housing space have been freed from the burden of collecting and trying to make sense of data in order to make decisions about investing, rent pricing, cost control, staffing, property management and the myriad of other business areas under their purview. The once scattered data has now become actionable information. And for those savvy enough to take advantage of it, it’s an incredibly powerful competitive advantage.

See how student properties outperform the market up to 14% with RealPage Revenue Management. Download the case study today!