executive insight Amenities Attract Students EdR’s Jeffrey Resetco shares strategies for success in a competitive market By Andie Lowenstein, Associate Editor Student housing is going through what could be considered the most interesting facelift ever. Millennials’ use of technology and preference for an abundance of ameni-ties combined with increased enrollment in higher education is changing the way stu-dent housing is produced. It’s also pushing the increase of private sector development of student housing. Jeffrey Resetco, vice president of real estate development and construction at EdR, discussed new proj-ects in the works and what’s to come for the future of student housing. good mix of local and national tenants for our retail space. We are continuing our development at the University of Kentucky and that proj-ect will add approximately 2,000 additional beds in 2015 and 2016 so that’s exciting for that campus. We have a project that is opening at the University of Louisville and that is one of our cottage-product develop-ments. That project should be consistent with the quality of other projects we have in that style such as The Retreat at State College at Penn State and The Retreat at Oxford at Ole Miss. Those projects are very similar to the new one at Louisville opening this summer. Q & A What does EdR have in the development pipeline? We have a fourth stage of our development at the University of Connecticut that is go-ing to take our total students in residence up to 1,010. That project is delivering this summer, and we’re excited about that. We have a brand-new project at the University of Georgia in Athens opening this summer. Both of those projects have retail in the ground oor, leasing for retail has been go-ing really well so we have some great new tenants in both of those developments. Re-tail has increased in student housing over the past few years and EdR is in the same situation as a lot of the other developers where we do include retail on the ground oor. In these two situations, the retail has been successful—we feel it will be a nice amenity to our residents and it adds to the interest in the project. We always target a 6 August 2015 | Multi-Housing News What are some of the most exciting amenities you’ve added or plan to add to your assets? Globally, we’re seeing a continued trend of resort pools and high-end tness rooms as the top amenities. The other thing we con-sider a real amenity is high-speed internet and we’re continuing to push the envelope on the speed that we deliver internet to our residents. We’re always trying to add more bandwidth to make any online experience as seamless as possible for the residents. Are you analyzing what Generation Z will want? I think a lot of the needs will be very similar. We’ve seen a number of the newest gen-eration interacting with our sales staff and operations team on a continued mobile ba-sis. Obviously mobile is very quickly over-taking the standard methods that are used by our residents for contacting our leasing ofce, signing leases, paying rent, putting in work orders, making comments that they’re referring to friends etc. All of those things are multiplying from a mobile platform, so we see that continuing to increase. As far as the other needs, we’re con-tinuing to study parking as a need and we haven’t determined whether that’s going to be a change from the resident types that we have now, but it’s possible the number of students with a car will change so that’s something to look at for the future: are resi-dents going to continue to have cars at our properties or are students going to look to public transportation, biking, walking, or other means of transportation? We haven’t made a determination yet, but I think we and our peers are looking at the next gen-