New Workshop: Building & Funding Student Housing

Next Tuesday, May 12 at 12pm ET we’re hosting a live 2-hour workshop led by Jared Hutter, CEO of Aptitude Development.

The same 1,200 SF unit that rents for $2,500 as a conventional apartment pulls $5,000-$6,000 per month leased by the bed to students — with 1-2% delinquency, parent-backed guarantors, and nearly a year of pre-leasing visibility. 

But breaking in isn't as simple as buying near a campus. You need to quantify demand down to the bed, design for two customers—students and parents—and structure deals that attract institutional capital at exit. Most multifamily operators have never seen that playbook unpacked.

This workshop is led by Jared Hutter, who has built his career sourcing, developing, and operating purpose-built student housing (PBSH) assets at Tier-1 universities — and he'll walk through his full framework, from market selection and demand modeling to ground-up underwriting and capital stack design, using live case studies from Aptitude's current portfolio, including projects at ASU and SUNY Binghamton.

Whether you're a developer exploring your first student housing deal, an operator looking to diversify beyond conventional multifamily, or an investor evaluating the space, you'll leave with a clear picture of how PBSH works and how to get into it.

Here's what you'll learn

• Why PBSH outperforms conventional multifamily: How per-bed leasing transforms unit economics, why delinquency runs 1–2% versus 4–7% in traditional apartments, and what makes parent-backed leases and academic-calendar visibility so powerful for underwriting.

• How to underwrite student housing deals: Ground-up development and acquisition underwriting using real models — including yield-on-cost targeting, rent assumptions, cost modeling, and institutional exit pricing in the low- to mid-5% cap range.

• What makes a site and market investable: Walkability to campus, proximity to student nodes, zoning constraints, structural supply barriers, and how to evaluate markets through both a development lens and an operating lens.

• How to structure capital stacks and partnerships: How developers and institutional investors partner on PBSH deals — co-GP arrangements, promotes, platform-level partnerships, and why favorable financing reflects the category's collection reliability and outsized demand-to-supply dynamics.

• How to quantify demand using university data: How to access and interpret publicly available enrollment figures — by class year, residency, and program — to calculate true bed deficits, layer in shadow-market assumptions, and arrive at precise demand estimates market by market.

• Why controlling the brand matters: How integrating development and management into a single operating platform drives 100–200 bps of enhanced yield — and what that means for leasing cadences, staffing, amenity programming, and parent communication.

All participants will receive recordings of the session, underwriting frameworks, and supplemental materials, shared via our private Circle community.

You'll also gain access to an active community of real estate investors, developers, operators, and capital allocators.

This workshop is delivered over one live 2-hour session: Tuesday, May 12th from 12:00-2:00 PM ET.

Reserve your spot now. Space is limited.

See you there!
–Brad & Paul