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The case for value-added student housing
Investors - SEPTEMBER 24, 2026

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The case for value-added student housing

by Maple Chen

Institutional capital has spent the last two years relearning how to underwrite risk. Office has forced a reckoning with obsolescence, and multifamily has had to answer for supply gluts in certain markets that arrived just as rate hikes reset every assumption in the model. Against that backdrop, student housing has quietly become one of the more attractive places to put capital to work, not because it is immune to those pressures, but because its structure gives investors a clearer read on where the risk actually sits.

National transaction volume reached $8.8 billion in 2025, up 48 percent from the 2023 trough, per Walker & Dunlop's 2026 Student Housing Outlook. That is capital flowing to a sector where the underwriting has grown more disciplined, not less.

Accord Group Holdings has advised Coastal Ridge Real Estate on the capital side of exactly this strategy. Coastal Ridge has been u

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