The holiday gift on real estate investors’ lists this year is: student housing.
Investcorp picked up more than $300 million worth of the darling asset class, including two properties in Texas, the Bahrain-based investor said in a news release.
The purchase includes four properties and totals almost 3,000 beds.
The properties are located off-campus near Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas State University in San Marcos, University of Kentucky in Lexington and University of Oklahoma in Norman. The addresses and sellers weren’t disclosed.
The asset at Texas A&M has 792 beds and is 99 percent occupied; the Texas State asset has 486 beds and is 98 percent occupied.
The property at University of Kentucky has 699 beds and is 96 percent occupied. The 684-bed asset at University of Oklahoma asset is 99 percent occupied.
This isn’t Investcorp’s first student housing purchase. It has owned and managed about 20,000 beds across 30 investments, the release said.
Unlike the tumultuous multifamily and office markets, student housing has remained resilient even in the face of high interest rates.
This school year, student housing has seen rent growth averaging 5 percent across the top 200 university markets, the Investcorp release noted, citing Yardi.
That’s in part because there’s a shortage of student housing.
Schools are enrolling 1.34 students for each available bed at the top 20 universities by housing inventory, CoStar reported, citing data from Walker and Dunlop in May. That ratio was 1.46 at Texas Tech University, 1.23 at Texas A&M University and 1.04 at the University of Texas at Austin.
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