The communities are paying off—for developers and the universities. The Clare, for example, is nearly 90 percent reserved with entrance fees starting at $500,000.
“University-related senior housing developers are among the most successful projects we’ve worked on,” says Matt Johnson, vice president with Greystone Communities, an Irving, Texas-based company that fee develops senior housing, including The Clare in Chicago and The Woodlands at Furman University. “They’re well-received because they have benefits that other senior housing projects do not offer.”
LIFELONG LEARNING Like Loyola University, Furman University’s own mission of integrated learning encouraged it to partner in the development of The Woodlands at Furman, a continuing-care retirement community for people age 62 and older on the school’s 1,000-acre campus in Greenville, S.C.
Furman’s emphasis on lifelong learning began about 15 years ago with the launch of the Furman University Learning in Retirement program. Called FULIR for short, the program is intended for retirees. It started with seven classes and 50 students and now boasts 100 classes and 700 students.
“The success of the FULIR program was a very important part of our analysis to get involved in The Woodlands,” says Dr. David Shi, president of Furman University. “It demonstrated that there is a large interest from retirees for substantive cultural and intellectual pursuits.”
Currently under construction, The Woodlands will offer 225-plus residences, including assisted-living and memory care, when it opens in early 2009. The project will provide another source of revenue for Furman—the community will be operated by a nonprofit organization that will pay rent to the school—and allow the university to financially benefit from land that was not critical to the school’s long-term needs for educational and student housing facilities, Shi explains.
Indeed, most universities have excess land that can be developed. Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H., for example, has a 1,000-acre campus with only 1,800 students. In 2006, the university decided to issue an RFP for a campus village that would include retail, student housing, and an active adult community. It recently chose New York City-based Leewood Real Estate Group to develop the project.
Preliminary plans call for Leewood Real Estate Group to sign a ground lease with Franklin Pierce University and to build a 400,000-square-foot project that includes 200 units of student housing, 200 units of age-restricted housing, and a number of retail venues, including a small movie theater. “The whole idea is that the village will be a place where students and residents [can] meet and greet,” says R. Randy Lee, president and founder of Leewood Real Estate Group.
Lee expects to break ground on the $50 million-plus project midyear. In the meantime, the firm and the school will create programs that will integrate older people into the campus environment. “We want to have an ongoing relationship with the university so the active adults will have an open door to the campus and be served in the same way the university serves its students,” he says.
COLLEGE CONNECTIONS Many universities pursue senior housing projects on campus to provide a place for retired university faculty and staff, the parents of current employees, or alumni who wish to return to the days of their youth.
Furman’s Shi says many people who have reserved units at The Woodlands are related to the school in some way or another. Similarly, 80 percent of the residents at Classic Residence by Hyatt in Palo Alto, Calif., are Stanford University alumni or retired faculty, says executive director Steve Brudnick, adding that the senior housing community is within walking distance of the university. The development, which features 388 independent units and 180 continuing-care units, is built on land leased from Stanford.
“Seniors have a different mentality today than they used to,” says Earl Wade, CEO of CRSA, a Memphis, Tenn.-based company that owns and operates senior housing communities across the United States. “They don’t live in the same house for 30 or 40 years, and their kids might be scattered across the world, so they can live out the remainder of their lives wherever they want—and a lot of them want to go back to their college campuses.”