On & Off-Campus Housing Costs in Big College Towns

Recently we posted about college towns with the best returns on investment.  If you’ve invested in student housing, your property(s) probably just come back to life as students recently returned to big cities & small towns all across the country.  These investments can be very lucrative as well as a form of house-hacking – especially if you have (or soon will have) a son or daughter living there as a student.  However, a new report from Trulia suggests that not all “big” college towns offer an advantage for students living off-campus, in privately-owned housing, and says there are some locales where the opposite is true;  that it’s more cost-efficient to live on campus.  Trulia looked at data from colleges/universities in some of the 48 biggest college towns across the country and compared what students pay for on-campus housing with what they would pay if they split a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate in the off-campus market.  For what it’s worth…

“The results were nothing short of surprising. While rents are rising, so is the price of living on campus. In 28 of the 48 places we looked at, it was either the same price or cheaper to be off-campus…”  Said Trulia economist Felipe Chacon.