The Importance of Tracking Student Housing Data

Student housing has a huge impact on the college campus experience. As a student housing operator, it’s your job to ensure that your university’s residence halls contribute to a positive environment. But that’s tough to do with limited visibility.

Tracking student housing data is the solution. It provides actionable information about your campus communities so you can improve them over time. That could be just what you need to reduce vacancy rates, have more happy residents, and achieve a variety of other common goals in the student housing industry.

We created this article to help you do it. Keep reading to learn why housing data matters, how you can benefit from tracking it, and for an introduction to key student housing metrics to monitor.

Why Student Housing Data Is Crucial

Student housing communities can be challenging to run. They’re often booked far in advance, have more rules to uphold than traditional off-campus options, and offer a variety of amenities. All of which take time and money to oversee. Tracking housing data can help you overcome challenges like these to deliver a better housing experience to your students.

For example, imagine you work at a school with a housing department that’s making minimal profit and your supervisor tells you to fix it. If the school is tracking housing data already, you could review metrics like vacancy rates, student satisfaction ratings, and average rent per bed to identify opportunities for improvement. The data would tell you where you need to start making changes to achieve your profitability goals.

Now imagine yourself in the same situation at a school that doesn’t track any housing data. You could guess what isn’t working, but wouldn’t have any data to back up your assumptions. This could lead to you investing time and money into issues that aren’t actually having a sizeable impact on your problem.

Benefits of Tracking Student Housing Data

Let’s take a closer look at some of the advantages you can gain by tracking your student housing data. Here are four key advantages.

Informed Decision-Making

The more data you have, the easier it is to identify the aspects of your student housing sector that are working currently and those that may need improvements. Data tells a story you can follow to achieve more of your housing goals, regardless of whether you want to improve resident retention, increase overall occupancy rates, or achieve other student housing solutions.

Enhanced Student Experience

Data lets you make more informed decisions, and you can use it to achieve a variety of objectives. One of the most impactful things you can do with data is to improve your students’ experiences with on-campus housing.

For example, you can use data to identify and track common issues found in student reviews, like a poor move-in experience or issues with sanitation in common areas. Your data could also tell you that some types of housing are favored over others (such as two-bedroom being more popular than four-bedroom units).

You can use this information to make decisions more in line with your students’ preferences. You can even offer alternatives for students with different preferences, such as international students. 

The net result of that work should be fewer complaints about campus apartments and better overall satisfaction with your campus’ student housing operations.

Optimized Housing Operations Through Resource Allocation

Sometimes the issues with campus accommodations are obvious. But finding the resources needed to fix them isn’t. Data can help you solve these types of problems by giving you the information you need to make your operations more financially efficient. This can free up space in your budget to finally address the problems you haven’t been able to fix.

For example, you might discover that your cost of turnover on student beds is especially high. This could prompt you to revamp your move-in and move-out experiences to cut costs and make more efficient use of the resources at your disposal.

Increased Safety And Security

Data can also be helpful for housing goals around safety and security. For example, you could track the times and days when security incidents occur and look for commonalities that point to opportunities for improvement. 

Your data may also tell you where in your building security incidents happen most frequently. This would lead you to beef up security mechanisms like cameras and security guard monitoring in those locations. Improving security in this way could help you achieve many goals, such as increasing international student enrollment and boosting investment volumes from outside capital.

Key Student Housing Metrics To Monitor

If your housing platform can track data, the next step is figuring out which metrics you should use it to monitor. This can vary based on your housing department’s goals but may include the following:

• Occupancy rate

• Retention rate

• Average satisfaction

• Beds per student

• Average rent per bed

• Amenity usage rates

• Cost of turnover

• Property management charges

• Revenue growth

It can be helpful to consider your goals when deciding which metrics to track. For example, if your vacancy rates are higher than you want, it would be smart to track student satisfaction ratings. These could help you figure out why more college students aren’t moving into your rental units.

Eliminate Duplicate Data And Keep Your Records Up-To-Date

Tracking student housing data can help you optimize your on-campus housing in many ways. But that becomes more difficult to do when your housing platform’s features don’t include tools for keeping your data clean. When duplicate data and out-of-date records stay in your system, they can impact your decision making and reduce your resource efficiency.

That’s one reason to consider upgrading to Housing.Cloud. We built our modern student housing software from the ground up to provide better data tracking and clean-up than the competition. It also includes a ton of features that can improve your housing offerings, like customizable workflows to reduce administration and self-service dashboards to help students get the support they need faster.

Want to learn more? Sign up for a demo today. We’ll give you a firsthand look at how Housing.Cloud can help you use data more effectively to reach your student housing goals.