Student Housing Portfolio Lands $92M Loan

Aspen Houston. Image courtesy of HFF

Aspen Heights and Safanad have secured $92 million in financing for a three-property student housing portfolio with 1,653 beds in Iowa, Texas and South Carolina. HFF worked on behalf of the partners to arrange the three-year, floating-rate loan through a large institutional lender, and loan proceeds were used to refinance existing construction financing. Doug Opalka, Casey Wenzel and Michael Johnson led the HFF debt placement team.

The trio of properties, built between 2017 and 2018, serve some of the largest public universities in the respective states.

Aspen Houston serves the University of Houston and is located at 4971 Martin Luther King Blvd. in the most populous city in Texas. Built in 2017, the property has 717 beds across two four-story buildings.

Aspen Ames is a 422-bed student community at 3306 Lincoln Way in Ames, Iowa, catering to Iowa State University, which has a student body of around 33,000. Aspen Conway, serving Coastal Carolina University, is a 514-bed asset with 116 cottage-style buildings at 2251 US-501 E. in Conway, S.C. The property serves Coastal Carolina University, a public liberal arts university with more than 10,000 students.

Student housing deals

In January 2018, Global investment firm Safanad purchased a 910-bed student community in Maryland for $69.5 million, boosting its student housing investment platform at the time to 11,000 beds. The project in Hyattsville, Md., serves residents attending Howard University and the University of Maryland.

Aspen Heights has developed 36 conventional family, student housing and assisted living properties with more than $1.5 billion in total value. Last September, the developer sold its Aspen Heights West Campus, a 166-unit student housing luxury asset in Austin, Texas, to a joint venture between The Preiss Co. and TH Real Estate.