Showing posts with label Matt Grossman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt Grossman. Show all posts

Thursday, September 12, 2019

Overbuilt "luxury" student housing: Speculators are turning university towns into slums

The Commercial Observer ran a story a few days ago about a financial crisis in the so-called luxury student-housing market. As reported by Matt Grossman, the default rate in this niche of the securitized real-estate market has gone up dramatically in recent years and now stands at15.3 percent. That's 60 percent higher than the default rate just eight months ago when it was 9 percent.

Luxury student-housing became a hot new investment sector a few years ago. Speculators built thousands of student-housing units in college towns all over the United States.  These units included features to attract college students--swimming pools, basketball courts, tanning beds, and fitness centers. Rents were high--over $1,000 a month. But parents often co-signed the leases, and many students paid their rent with student-loan money.

After the new complexes were rented up and began showing positive cash flow, the speculators packaged them into mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investment pools--pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors.

But the speculators built too many luxury student apartments. College students--a notoriously fickle bunch--tended to move out of older units to take up residence in swankier new digs. Vacancy rates spiked upward in the older buildings, the new owners found themselves unable to service their mortgages, and now many of these so-called luxury apartment buildings are going into default.

How did this happen? First, as I have said, these luxury apartments were overbuilt by speculators; and the speculators simply did not care. They had no local ties to the college towns. Their plan was to sell the units quickly while they were still new, take their profits, and move on to the next investment.

Moreover, most of this so-called luxury student housing is not luxury housing at all. It's just new housing. If you go inside one of these apartments, you will likely find plastic interior doors, cabinets made out of particle board rather than wood, and cheap appliances and amenities.

And now--in the space of just a few years--universities all over America are ringed by aging apartment complexes, many of which have gone into default. As the buildings decay, rents are slashed, maintenance is deferred, and before long these so-called luxury apartment buildings become slums.

I see this tragedy unfolding in my own neighborhood, where thousands of apartment buildings have been thrown up in the flood plain near Louisiana State University. But you can see this phenomenon in almost any town with a major university.

Everybody knows that the federal student-loan program has created millions of paupers, people who have amassed so much student debt that they will never pay it off. Even Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has acknowledged this calamity.

But the federal student-loan program has also contributed to an environmental crisis--the emergence of slum housing around America's colleges and universities. The glut in student housing is at least partly attributable to the federal student loan program, which allowed students to rent luxury apartments with borrowed money

 If you want to see an example of this crisis, drive through the Tigerland neighborhood, a jumble of old apartment buildings originally built for students near LSU in Baton Rouge.

Parts of Tigerland are now a serious slum where you would not want to live if you were a college student.  And not far away, new apartments are still being built--Tigerlands in the making in just a few years.