Most parents write four years of rent checks to a landlord they never meet. We bought instead, furnished it from 700 miles away, and rent it out when we are not in it. Here is how to work out whether that is right for your family, before anybody talks you into a price.
Freshmen are in the dorms. From sophomore year on, leases in most college towns run twelve months, and your student uses about nine of them. You pay for all twelve, for three straight years, including the summers the place sits empty. You are paying twelve months either way. The only real question is who gets the check.
In a two- or three-bedroom, the rooms your student does not need rent to roommates on that same twelve-month cycle. That rent lands against the carry every month, summers included. It is the difference between owning an expense and owning an asset with a tenant already in it. It is also the model we run in one of our own condos.
Almost every family who buys lands on one of three. They are different amounts of money, different amounts of work, and different rules. We have done the first and the third, and we say so where it matters.
Buy before freshman year. Use it for visits while your student is in the dorms, and improve it in the meantime. Your student and one roommate move in sophomore year. One roommate’s contribution and the hotel nights you genuinely skip are what offset the cost.
The same purchase in a three-bedroom. Your student and one roommate take two rooms, and the third stays yours for visits. Do not model that third room as both a guest room and a source of rent. Decide what it is for, then price it that way.
Path one, then a second condo that permits short-term rentals. You use it when you visit and rent it when you do not. Two properties, two purposes, two sets of economics, and considerably more work than the other two.
Your building decides whether you can rent by the night, not your city. It is written into the association documents, it varies wildly between buildings that look identical from the street, and no listing will tell you. If any part of path three appeals to you, that question comes before the price question.
Which buildings allow what, where the price premium actually sits, who shows up on a Tuesday when the water heater fails: none of that generalizes. So we publish a market at a time, and only where we have actually bought, renovated and rented.
Two condos, both ours. Inside the loop and what it costs, which complexes permit short-term rentals, what our renovation actually ran, and the two $29 guides.
See the Tuscaloosa market →Same structure, different buildings and different rules. We will not publish a market guide for a town we have only visited.
Get the free guide and reply to the first email with the school. We keep a list, and it decides the order we go in.
Twenty years in enterprise software sales, and the one who builds the models. Handles the deal analysis, the systems, and the automation behind the condo.
Sourced and designed every room in Crimson Star. Runs the furnishing playbook, the vendor list, and what guests actually see when they walk in.
Eight free pages on whether a college town condo makes sense for your family, what you are actually comparing across four years, and how to choose where in a town you visit three times a year. It does not assume you have already decided.