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People often look back on their college years with fondness: the friendships made, the academic goals achieved, the stories Mom and Dad probably don’t need to hear.
But the places where they lived? Not so much, especially after they moved out of the dorm.
“The service at my off-campus housing was abominable: Maintenance requests sat for weeks, management was unresponsive, and our house had serious life safety issues,” Cameron Koffman recalls. “Senior year, the ceiling in my bedroom actually caved in.”
Today, as co-founder and chief operating officer of Hackberry Lane, Koffman is working with his partners to make off-campus housing a better experience for students — while serving a section of the asset class that they say has been ignored for too long.
Hackberry Lane co-founder and CEO Reid Marks said purpose-built off-campus apartment housing attracted the lion’s share of institutional capital in recent decades. In the meantime, so-called shadow market properties such as houses and townhouses were largely overlooked, even as they posted higher occupancy and stronger rent growth. This has been fueled in part by shrinking supply, as developers raze this type of housing to make room for more purpose-built apartments.
“Purpose-built is a great product for a lot of people, but the quintessential college experience — and the one that I wanted when I was in school — was where you live in a house or a townhouse with friends and have a porch or a backyard,” Marks said. “That's what is missing in the purpose-built student housing market.”
Since its founding in 2023, the vertically integrated firm has acquired more than $600M in student housing assets. It operates more than 4,000 beds across seven flagship campuses, including the University of Alabama, University of Florida and Auburn University. Each market shares the same dynamic: growing enrollment and rising demand for off-campus housing, paired with a dwindling supply of quality homes and townhomes.
Marks said Hackberry Lane meets that demand by acquiring homes that have never been professionally managed, and then bringing them up to standard through scale, disciplined management and hospitality-level service.
“Few have been able to do this because it is very challenging to operate these properties professionally without real scale,” he said. “We’ve targeted markets with affluent student bodies, strong Greek life, growing enrollment and powerhouse athletic programs."
When operated well, these homes command per-bed rents in line with or above purpose-built housing, Marks said, “while still giving residents significantly more space for their money.”
Answering Texts, Building Relationships
Service means two things for Hackberry Lane. For one, it entails an ongoing effort to ensure that the 4,000 students in its properties feel safe, comfortable and heard — so that its residents never experience the sort of management neglect that Koffman and the other founders experienced in their college years.
“Students expect and deserve a fast response on a work order, a leasing team that actually texts back and an ownership group that invests in the upkeep of their unit,” he said. “We want them to know we care.”
Koffman said Hackberry Lane hires “top-tier” talent, trains them in customer service and holds them to a “high bar” for responsiveness. Its managers and other employees at each location work directly for the company, share its commitment to customer service and understand the nuances and priorities of their particular campus and student body.
Combining a brand that emphasizes customer service with robust resident programming creates a sense of community. Koffman said this is important for resident recruitment and retention.
“We also spend the time to build real relationships on campus and understand how to reach the groups that students organize their lives around: Greek organizations, preprofessional societies, club sports teams and other extracurricular groups,” he said. “When a group of friends or a chapter chooses to live with us, they tend to stay together and bring the next class with them.”
Curated To Residents' Lifestyles
For Hackberry Lane, service also includes attention to the details that an institutional owner can overlook or a small landlord might lack the resources to offer, said Nick Helfand, co-founder and president.
“We go to great lengths to curate each property to the people who actually live there,” Helfand said. “That may mean dedicated vanity rooms that double as backdrops for get-ready-with-me content, fully operable garage-style doors that open living spaces to the outdoors, or outdoor TVs that make every Saturday feel like a home game.”
Large floor plans, solid construction and attention to the “fundamentals” also help the company set its properties apart from what is normally available to college students, he said.
“A beautifully designed bedroom doesn't mean much if you can hear your neighbor's FaceTime calls through paper-thin walls at 2 a.m.,” Helfand said. “We pair wide-plank flooring with premium sound attenuation throughout, which is the kind of detail that never shows up in a rendering but that residents notice every day.”
Helfand said Old Row on Hackberry, the company’s first ground-up development, exemplifies what Hackberry Lane is trying to achieve with its properties. Completed in 2026 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Old Row combines townhome-style living, a desirable location and quality amenities.
Hackberry Lane also operates several boutique apartment-style assets under the Haven brand, with the same attention to detail it gives its townhouse properties.
With thousands of beds under management and a service-first culture, Marks and his team said they have found the formula for operating shadow market student housing at the highest level.
“Value is created through operational alpha, and to win, we need to be the best operators in the business,” he said. “At its core, this is a hospitality business. If we do it right, when our residents talk about the best parts of college, where they lived will be part of that conversation.”
This article was produced in collaboration between Hackberry Lane and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.
Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.
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