Student Rental Strategy- Creating relationships in colleges

[Kyle Curtin]

Hi everyone!

I have a 3 family property that I owner occupy 9 minutes away from a big college in Massachusetts. I recently dug deeper into the student rental strategy and am going to give it a shot for one of my vacant units.

Coincidentally I am reading the book “Who Not How” (Gamechanging read!) and am looking for a “who” within the college to create a relationship with to be able find me groups of students searching for housing nearby and give them an opportunity for a clean & suitable experience that is not too pricey compared to the room and board rates.

The “who’s” that came to mind were coaches (heard this from a bp podcast), guidance counselors, & maybe directors of different departments, and I was going to use the website’s staff directory as well as leveraging relationships with past students to try to make introductions.

Has anyone done this? Who do you feel could be a good fit to create this relationship with?

Thank you so much!!

[Jaron Walling]

@Kyle Curtin That sounds great and I'm all for it but I honestly the units need to justify the costs. Circling back to my first response... almost every property I rented during college was clearly a student rental. Only the last property we rented (myself and two other good friends) was nice. It was farther from campus but we all rode bikes and got to class in <10 mins so it wasn't an inconvenience. We had a full basement, hard wood floors, 2 car garage, driveway, and no crazy neighbors. I bought a motorcycle. We actually took care of the place. We had garage parties, worked on cars, and did "adult" things. We were juniors and seniors by that time. Maybe you can screen for that (covertly) and be selective without breaking your state laws. 

Funny thing is the landlord was by far the worst we every had. We saw her two times during our 12 month lease. The gutters literally fell off the house and she made no attempt to fix them. I repaired plumbing leaks and various other things because I'm handy and our texts/calls would go unanswered. 

There's a ton of student rental discussions in the BP forums. Some of it quite entertaining. I'd search them out and learn from more experienced investors.