How to Set Up an Off-Campus Housing Program at Your University

Setting up an off-campus housing program takes four things: a documented bed gap, one office that owns the work, a written listing and vetting policy, and a search tool students will actually open. Most campuses can get a functional version live inside one academic year with a single dedicated coordinator and no new software build. Only 17 percent of institutions currently provide dedicated resources for the move off campus, per a 2025 StarRez survey reported by Inside Higher Ed — the bar for being genuinely useful is lower than it looks.

If your residence halls house a third of your enrollment, you already run an off-campus housing operation. The only question is whether it's a program or a shrug. The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study puts on-campus residency at roughly 16 percent of all undergraduates — meaning the off-campus market shapes retention, wellness, and parent phone calls whether or not anyone on your org chart owns it.

Key Takeaways

• Start with the bed gap. Enrollment minus beds, in writing, is what unlocks budget conversations.
• One owner, one inbox. Programs split across Residence Life, Dean of Students, and Basic Needs answer nobody.
• Write vetting criteria before you accept a single listing — Texas State requires a complex to be open at least six months, tours it in person, and reviews outstanding city complaints first.
• The Fair Housing Act covers what you publish, not just what landlords do.
• Don't endorse. Verify, publish the criteria, and let students compare.
• Measure lease disputes, sophomore retention, and mediation volume. Page views tell you nothing.

Step 1: Count your bed gap and put it in writing

Subtract your on-campus beds from your enrollment, then subtract again for the cohort your residency requirement already covers. What's left is your off-campus population, and it's almost always larger than anyone expects. Texas State enrolls about 40,000 students against just over 10,000 beds — roughly 30,000 people whose housing decisions the university has an interest in but no direct control over.

Bring that number to your cabinet before you propose staffing. Sixty percent of institutions in the StarRez survey said the move off campus has a moderate to significant effect on the student experience, and 72 percent believed an easier transition would improve wellness and success. Those two figures plus your bed gap are the whole business case.

Step 2: Decide which office owns the program, and name a person

Assign the program to one office and put a named coordinator on it. Housing and Residence Life is the most common home because the data and the landlord relationships already live there, though Dean of Students works when the emphasis leans toward advocacy and conduct. What fails is the split arrangement, where listings sit with Housing, tenant complaints route to Legal, and nobody owns the student who calls at 4:45 on a Friday.

Texas State runs this with a director of housing administration over the function and a senior coordinator of off-campus living, Tyler Barstow, doing the day-to-day work — including mediating landlord disputes. That second role is the one campuses skip and then regret. A listing page can be a collateral duty. Mediation can't.

Step 3: Write the listing policy before you accept a single listing

Decide in writing what appearing on your list does and does not mean, then publish that language on the page itself. Texas State's position is direct: the university doesn't endorse or promote one complex over another, but anything listed has been verified as a partner. That distinction is the whole ballgame, legally and reputationally.

Answer four questions before launch. Who may submit a listing. What disqualifies a property. Who removes a listing, and on what grounds. And whether landlords pay anything — because the moment money changes hands, your list starts to look like an endorsement whether you meant it that way or not.

Fair housing is your problem too

The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability — and it reaches notices and statements published about a rental, not only leasing decisions. If your office republishes landlord-written copy, you're the publisher. Train whoever approves listings to catch phrasing like "mature tenants" or "quiet professional building."

Step 4: Set vetting criteria and apply them identically every time

Pick four or five criteria you can verify consistently, and resist adding more. Texas State's set is a good template: the complex has to have been open at least six months, staff take an in-person tour, they review present and outstanding complaints with the City of San Marcos, and they collect student feedback first. Every listed property also sits on a university shuttle route.

Consistency matters more than rigor. A criterion applied to some landlords and not others is worse than no criterion — it invites the exact favoritism accusation the policy exists to prevent. Write the checklist, date it, keep the completed copies.

Treat student complaints as vetting input

"We like to know what students know about these places or what they think about them before we tell other students that it's a great thing to do," Barstow told Inside Higher Ed. It's the cheapest data source you have, and most offices leave it in a filing cabinet. Log complaints against the property, not just the student's case, so patterns surface at renewal.

Step 5: Choose the search tool students will actually open

Students will not use a PDF list. Decide early whether to maintain a searchable inventory yourself or partner with an existing platform — building one internally is a multi-year software commitment most housing offices aren't staffed for. Four evaluation criteria are enough: does it cover the properties near your campus, is it free to students, does it carry resident feedback rather than marketing copy, and can your office see what students see?

Full disclosure, since we're a vendor in this category: Find My Place is one of the tools you'd be evaluating, and we'd rather you hold us to that checklist than take our word for it. What we can point at concretely is verified student reviews tied to real tenancies across thousands of properties, per-bedroom pricing on every listing, and a contract marketplace students use to hand off a lease instead of paying a buyout. There's a longer walkthrough written for housing teams if it helps. Whatever you land on, run it through those four questions before you sign anything.

Step 6: Build the education layer, not just the listings

Listings without education produce students who found a place and still signed something bad. Build three things first: a lease-reading walkthrough, a budget worksheet with utilities and parking broken out, and a plain-language explanation of how financial aid disbursement lines up against a landlord's rent due date. That last one causes more first-generation crises than anything else on the list.

Texas State points students to its Attorney for Students Office, budgeting worksheets, and the Austin Tenants' Council. You likely have equivalents already — student legal services, a local tenants' union, a city housing department — and the work is connecting them, not creating them. Just over two in five Texas State undergraduates are first-generation, which is why that office treats early education as a priority rather than a nice-to-have.

Answer the dorm-versus-apartment question with real math

Students and parents arrive asking which is cheaper, and a dorm rate and an advertised rent don't measure the same thing. Give them the all-in comparison, utilities and food included. A side-by-side breakdown of dorms versus off-campus housing is a reasonable handout to adapt.

Step 7: Open a standing channel to landlords and city code enforcement

Schedule recurring meetings with property managers and invite your city's code compliance team. Texas State holds quarterly meetings with apartment managers to share institutional and city resources — and to give landlords a channel to report concerns about a student back to the university, whether that's a retention risk or a basic-needs issue. That reverse flow is where the early-warning value lives, and most programs never build it. If your landlords need help with student leasing cycles, FMP's guide to marketing rentals to college students covers the timing questions they usually ask.

Step 8: Measure the program on outcomes you'd defend at a budget hearing

Report three or four metrics annually: sophomore-to-junior retention split by residency, mediations handled and how they resolved, complaint volume by property, and the share of off-campus students who used an education resource before signing. Skip page views. A 2024 Student Voice survey from Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found 25 percent of students said they'd be more involved if they lived on or near campus — that's the gap the program exists to close, and no traffic dashboard measures it.

Common Mistakes

• Publishing a list with no written criteria. The first time a student has a bad experience at a listed property, you'll be asked why it was on the list. Have an answer on file.
• Undisclosed paid placement. Taking landlord money isn't automatically wrong. Hiding it destroys the trust that makes the list worth maintaining.
• Treating the program as a website. Listings are the least valuable part. Advising, mediation, and education change outcomes.
• Launching in July. Most students sign for the following year between October and February, so a program that goes live after the leasing window misses a full cohort.
• No removal process. Everyone builds the path for adding a property. Removing one requires a documented process you wrote before you needed it.

Frequently Asked Questions About Off-Campus Housing Programs

What does an off-campus housing program cost to run?

One coordinator salary is the real line item. Everything else — a listing tool, printed guides, two housing fairs a year, refreshments for quarterly landlord meetings — is small by comparison. Institutions that try to launch without the salary end up with a page nobody maintains.

Can our university be held liable for a property we list?

Talk to your general counsel — it depends on your state and on what your listing page claims. The risk-reduction moves are the same everywhere: publish an explicit non-endorsement statement, document the vetting checklist for every property, and screen listing copy against fair housing requirements. Verified is a defensible word. Recommended is a harder one.

When in the academic year should we launch?

Aim for September so the program is live before the leasing window opens in October. If you miss that, launch in January with the education layer only and add listings over the summer. Going live mid-window with an incomplete property list is worse than waiting a term.

How do we handle a dispute between a student and a listed landlord?

Name a mediator in advance and define what they can and can't do. Texas State's coordinator identifies the source of the problem and possible fixes, and is explicit that the role is student advocacy — not arbitration and not legal representation. Route anything approaching a legal question to student legal services or a tenants' council.

Where to Start

Pull your bed count and your enrollment, subtract, write the number down. Then find out who on campus is already fielding off-campus housing questions informally, because someone is. Those two facts fit on a one-page proposal, which is how most of these programs get funded.