Student Housing Business

JAN-FEB 2017

Student Housing Business is the voice of the student housing industry.

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THE SHB INTERVIE W StudentHousingBusiness.com January/February 2017 29 parking deck. RISE is also going to be performing facilities and asset management services in a partnership with LSU's residen- tial living department. That phase broke ground in September 2016, and will deliver in 2018. The part- nership with LSU has been truly a blessing. We are excited to be associated with LSU for years to come. SHB: What does RISE have planned for 2017? Blais: RISE is going to maintain its core areas of focus this year. We plan to grow our on-campus development portfolio; we are concentrating on enhancing our property management platform and our management practices through automation; and we are intensifying our focus on acquisi- tions. While in recent years we have been quite active in off-cam- pus development, we are reacting to the market in 2017 by limiting our focus to a few markets for off campus development. Why? We feel that inventory levels are reaching softening points in many markets, compression of cap rates and lending belts have tightened. There remains plenty of capital for student housing assets and we are looking to capitalize on the high levels of interested capital through acquisitions. That part of our plan we are very excited about in 2017. SHB: Acquisitions are new for RISE. How did you determine to pursue acquiring assets? Blais: In 2014, RISE began oper- ating several of the off campus properties that we had developed. In November 2015, we acquired Ambling Student Housing and overnight had a management platform of over 20,000 student beds distributed on and off cam- pus. Overnight we became a siz- able developer/operator and that began to fuel the interest of increasing our owned assets. We know the student space. We know how to underwrite. We took that experience and studied the assets in our management port- folio. That analysis yielded sev- eral ripe targets for acquisition. The assets were in solid university markets, had strong leasing histo- ries and solid pre-leasing results for the upcoming academic year. The assets had strong NOI growth and were providing solid inves- tor yields. We have capital and access to capital, so we employed the plan we had developed and in 2016, we acquired two assets and today have LOIs on several more. We have set a goal to acquire over a dozen assets in 2017 and that is a goal we intend to accomplish. It has our focus.

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