Campus Advantage
School Cool: The Automatic Lofts in Chicago, one of Campus Advantage’s latest management contracts, serves more than six area colleges.
Credit: Campus Advantage
• Year Founded: 2003
• No. of Employees: 1,000-plus
• No. of Properties Managed: 52
• No. of Beds Managed: 30,000
• Estimated 2010 Revenue: $10 million
• Market Coverage: National in 21 states
“We do a lot of targeted recruiting, reaching out to student organizations and administrators to identify the students who have already flagged themselves as active leaders,” Oltersdorf says. “We likewise encourage the perception of the job as a coveted and competitive position: Having 60 or more applicants is not unusual for a typical property with six openings.” Still, the recruiting task isn’t always an easy one: Campus Advantage contends with restaurant and retailer employers that can usually offer equal or better compensation with a much lighter hourly commitment. (CAs are typically compensated with a varying combination of stipend and price-adjusted meals and housing that, in total, is equitable to prevailing job-market wages for the college student demographic.) To compete, the company emphasizes the value of on-the-job experience with a seminar for existing and inbound CAs each spring called “From CA to CEO,” which outlines transferable skills, assists with resume building, and encourages the seniors in the group to consider staying in student housing, specifically with Campus Advantage.
Intensive time and resource investment in student recruiting is undoubtedly invaluable to Campus Advantage, where having in-the-know students on the ground is seen as a prerequisite for on-site success. In fact, more than half of the corporate executive team boasts a resident assistant bullet point on their own resumes, and even those with no personal on-site RA experience see the upshot of having the students run the show. “If you left leasing ideas up to a 48-year-old white male accountant, things would be pretty lame,” attests Campus Advantage executive vice president of operations and finance Mark Hager. “Fortunately, we have 400 people in their early 20s who are our consumers, at our properties, using our services, and driving our ideas. Every week they come up with something I never would have thought of.”
Case in point: social networking campaigns centered on property mascots. “We just started using mascots at properties this year, and it’s really taking off,” says Campus Advantage vice president of operations Chip Schell, noting that Campus Assistants pick the mascot and write its back story. Participating properties to date include Cabana Beach in Gainesville, Fla., near the University of Florida featuring Copa the Parrot and Campus Lodge in Tampa, Fla., near the University of South Florida featuring Bob the Moose. “You’ve got this fairy animal that is just this furry hunk of colored cloth that has taken on a life of its own on YouTube and Facebook,” Schell says. “That’s the success angle to social media: You can post, ‘We have a free rent special,’ or you can post videos of your parrot driving around in a convertible or your moose on a beach in Clearwater.” Results of the marketing initiative speak for themselves: Leasing velocity at properties with mascots has improved by 25 percent.
To assist CAs with assuming the accounting, marketing, and management responsibilities of million dollar real estate assets, Campus Advantage relies heavily on training and technology. Every year, senior residence life staff, including residence directors and multi-year CA veterans, is flown into Austin for a week-long “train the trainer” boot camp where student staffers are trained on everything from alcohol awareness and crisis management to throwing a job fair or managing roommate arguments.
