Student Housing Business

NOV-DEC 2015

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

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THE SHB INTERVIE W STUDENT HOUSING BUSINESS .COM NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 89 that's a very comfortable number. So far in 2016, our deliveries are estimated at about $150 million and for 2017 we've announced $100 mil- lion so far, but we expect to get to about $250 million. Opening new communities is time consuming, but very exhilarating. SHB: I'm not sure if you saw it, but in our What's On My Mind column in the September/October issue of SHB, Fred Pierce gave you credit as turning EdR around. How do you look at EdR now compared to before you took over? Churchey: Of course I've read my latest Student Housing Business magazine, and I did send Fred Pierce an e-mail thanking him for that one phrase. When I joined EdR, the company's industry reputation was very good, but its Wall Street reputation was not. We had a lot of talented, great people here and we had just taken a misstep on Wall Street that was easy to cor- rect with the Wall Street experi- ence that I had. When you look around the company here today, most of the senior leaders are folks that were at EdR when I started. We have had a great last six years. Our investors are very happy and the primary metric they focus on is total shareholder return. We have been in the top 15th percentile of all public REITs during that fve and three-quarter-year period of time, or said differently, our total shareholder return during this time period ranks us number 19 of 129 public REITs in existence over that time period. Consequently, we have ready access to Wall Street capi- tal because of the returns that the team has delivered which provides a great deal of opportunity for our team and also for our university partners. What's different? It's the same people. We fxed the Wall Street side, and things have been great. SHB: When you look at both on- campus and off, what strikes you as the most interesting trend you see? Churchey: What's very interesting about the on-campus side is that somewhere around 2010 there real- ly weren't many on-campus assets that were owned by someone other than the university or a universi- ty affliate. Now, the two leading public student housing companies own about $2 billion of assets on EdR has been developing Storrs Center, a mixed-use town center that includes student housing, near the University of Connecticut campus for several years. www.ERGinternational.com EdR partnered with GEM Realty Capital and Schenk Realty Group to develop The Marshall, a 900-bed project in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis that serves students at the University of Minnesota.

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