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Record High To Record Low: Student Housing Fundamentals 'Rubber Band' In 2024

After a record-high student housing preleasing season during the fall of 2024, landlords experienced whiplash in the last half of the year.

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Preleasing of student housing beds slowed down in the back half of 2024.

Preleasing on student housing units between March and August of 2024 was the slowest pace on record, according to data compiled by RealPage Market Analytics. Preleasing didn't even hit 40% by August, with the historic average being roughly 45% at that point in the year.

That comes after student housing landlords experienced a gangbuster fall preleasing season from September to February, with 49% of all student housing beds at 175 core universities leased out by January 2024 — the highest tally ever tracked by RealPage.

RealPage experts say the industry isn’t falling off a cliff. Instead, its fundamentals are stabilizing heading into 2025. Full-year student housing occupancy landed at 92.8% in 2024, nearly 200 basis points below 2023 but on par with the historical average.

“Fall 2025 is setting up to look a lot like 2019. And that’s not a bad thing,” RealPage Chief Economist Carl Whitaker said during the firm’s December webinar on the student housing sector. “Keep in mind that pace of deceleration was a little bit of a rubber band effect.”

The fall 2024 boom correlated with U.S. undergraduate and graduate program enrollment, which jumped 4.5% to 817,000 students, the first growth of higher education enrollment since the coronavirus pandemic, NPR reported, citing data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Enrollment by freshmen alone increased 5.5%, driven by older first-year students.

RealPage Content Manager Julia Bunch also noted on the webinar that overall U.S. apartment occupancy hit a decade low at the end of 2023, which may have also played into 2024’s second-half slowdown. 

“The conventional housing occupancy also began to bottom out at that time. So that means students would have had the opportunity to shop conventional opportunities,” Bunch said. 

The sector’s softening numbers look to be carrying over into 2025, though. Preleased occupancy across the U.S. was 36.6% in December, a 1.3% year-over-year decline, according to industry data provider College House.

Still, the industry is optimistic.

“The fundamentals have never been better. We’re going to raise rents, but we’re going to do it in tiers and we’re still going to be successful,” Asset Living Executive Vice President of Business Development Jason Fort said during a student housing conference in December, as reported by Student Housing Business. “Students need a place to live, deliveries are down and enrollments are up in Power Four schools. There’s never been a better time to be in student housing than right now.”