Beyond the Dorm: Rethinking the Housing Ecosystem Around Universities
At the spring ICF Real Estate Colloquium, Prof. Cameron LaPoint, Steven Elliott, and Sara Shank explored how universities and private capital are reshaping campus-area housing markets.
On April 14, students gathered at the Yale School of Management for the latest installment of the ICF Real Estate Colloquium - Housing the Knowledge Economy: Universities, Real Estate, and the Future of Campus-Adjacent Housing. The session, moderated by Cameron LaPoint, Assistant Professor of Finance at Yale SOM, focused on one of the most dynamic and overlooked corners of the property market: housing in and around college campuses.
The discussion featured Steven D. Elliott '93 MBA, Senior Managing Director of Real Estate Development at Stanford University, alongside Sara Shank, CEO and founder of Seventh Street Capital, an institutional platform focused on scattered-site student housing. Together, the panel offered perspectives from university real estate development, private investment management, and academia.
Elliott described how research universities have increasingly stepped into the role of long-term developer. Facing high housing costs in their local markets, institutions like Stanford have built thousands of homes for faculty, staff, and graduate students to support recruitment and retention. Universities, he noted, plan in decades rather than years, weighing financial returns against their broader academic mission.
Shank focused on a different slice of the market: the houses and small multifamily buildings near campuses long owned by local landlords. This "shadow market" makes up an estimated 55% of housing in top college towns, yet remains largely untouched by institutional investors. Her approach centers on proximity - properties within a half-mile of campus consistently lease up quickly and trade at meaningful discounts to newer, purpose-built developments farther away.
The conversation underscored how university-centered property markets sit at the crossroads of higher education, urban development, and capital investment - and how rising costs, shifting student demand, and longer-term demographic trends are reshaping the landscape. For students interested in real estate, LaPoint's conversation with Elliott and Shank offered a practical look at how universities and private capital are increasingly shaping the same markets from different vantage points.
