Student Housing Development and Football: Commercial Trend Watch

National championship banners have a tremendous effect on school spirit, but a new report suggests they also impact student housing development.

Great news, student housing developers — the next time your boss catches you checking football scores at work, you can simply say that you’re doing market research!

Citing a recent CBRE study, Bisnow reports that enrollment at universities with major football programs tends to spike following a successful season. A rise in attendance creates an increase in demand for student housing, making student housing development more valuable at these universities as compared to “non-football” schools. This effect is most pronounced at “Power Five” schools (universities that play their games in the PAC-12, Big Ten, ACC, SEC, or Big 12 conferences), but other football schools to experience this phenomenon include the University of Houston, Boise State, and the University of Cincinnati.

This writer has been looking for any reason at all to put together a college football preview, so let’s take a look at the housing landscape around last year’s final top-five finishers in football (plus one bonus university) using our map-based real estate application, LandVision™. To keep things simple, we’ll limit our search to only include multifamily properties within one half-mile of the 50-yard line of each school’s home stadium. So get out of your seats, sports fans, it’s time for kickoff!

Student Housing Development at Top-Five Football Schools

1. Clemson University

This year’s defending national champion, Clemson University, plays its home games in the 81,500-seat Memorial Stadium. The stadium is located on the west edge of campus, which perhaps explains why we only see seven multifamily properties within half of a mile of the stadium.

2. University of Alabama

Conversely, our search returns 144 multifamily properties within a half-mile radius of the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium. That’s quite a list to perform a deeper analysis on, but if we needed to refine our results, we could do so using property characteristics such as lot size, building square footage, and the number of units, or with the help of property value, last market sale information, and ownership details.

3. Ohio State University

Ohio Stadium, otherwise known as “The Horseshoe,” is the home of Ohio State football. Columbus is a bit more urban than Tuscaloosa and as a result, housing is not quite as dense around the stadium. Our search turns up 22 multifamily properties in this area.

4. University of Oklahoma

The Sooners of the University of Oklahoma have called The Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium home since 1923. Situated on the south side of the university’s campus, the stadium is also within a half-mile of six multifamily properties.

5. University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Stadium sits directly in the heart of one of the country’s most scenic college campuses. Although not technically a member of a Power Five (or any) football conference, the school boasts one of college football’s most storied programs. There are also four multifamily properties within a half-mile radius of the school’s football stadium.

Bonus: University of Southern California

We’ll end this post with one of college football’s traditional powerhouses from a little closer to our California office. USC’s home games are played in the recently renovated Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which is located just south of campus. Rather than a property search, we used the Points of Interest search function in LandVision to locate buildings classified as student housing so that we could filter out any nearby multifamily buildings that aren’t associated with the university. Within our map view, this search returned four results.

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Regardless of what school they cheer for, over 20,000 real estate professionals trust LandVision to help them find off-market opportunities faster. Schedule a free demo today!

Commercial Trend Watch: Student Housing and Football