Picerne Military Housing Expands into the Student Housing Market
Picerne Military Housing, announced today that it is expanding to the student housing market with the launch of a new parent company called Corvias Group, and a new student housing division called Corvias Campus Living.
By Jessica Fiur, News Editor
East Greenwich, R.I.—Picerne Military Housing, announced today that it is expanding to the student housing market with the launch of a new parent company called Corvias Group, and a new student housing division called Corvias Campus Living.
“We’ve always wanted to expand into other branches of our industry,” John Picerne, founder of Picerne Military Housing and CEO of Corvias Group tells MHN. “We were looking for a place where we could provide a higher level of quality like we provided to the military, and student housing really showed up as [an area] where our program and our services would do the greatest amount of good.”
Picerne says that student housing was a natural move for his company because both military housing and student housing share similar aspects.
“The government had for years and years under-restricted budgets, and never had enough money to put into the kind of infrastructure and training programs. In the military’s case, they would have to make choices between training programs, training initiatives and facilities for training and things like that, or infrastructure housing, the lesser attractive stuff,” Picerne says. “Schools really suffer from the same challenges. Their core mission is to educate, and they educate through classrooms and laborites and new science wings and business buildings and things like that, and they don’t necessarily educate through housing. So money doesn’t flow into housing like it does into other buildings on campus. You do that for enough years, and you have a deferred maintenance program and a deferred development program of a significant size.
“Like the military, schools have limited budgets and they really are struggling with this underlying infrastructure and how do we fix it, and that’s where our program comes along,” he continues.
Corvias Campus Living will manage a school’s entire housing portfolio, which is a bit unusual in the industry.
“We’re trying to deal with a college or university’s entire portfolio instead of the one-off project that they’ve typically been doing,” Picerne says. “We’re really dealing with a revitalization and modernization and sustainment program for a college’s entire portfolio. “
Picerne says that their experience with military is Corvias’s key advantage in the student housing market.
“We’re trying to be tremendously innovative in the industry,” he says. “The reason we think it’s a unique opportunity, and why we think we’re uniquely qualified for it is we’ve done exactly what we’ve done with the military.”
