Last week I had the immense privilege of being a Faculty Member at the Global Housing Training Institute which was held in Melbourne, Australia for the first time. The Institute provides a week-long intensive course for mid-senior professionals who have recently, or are preparing to, transition into leadership roles. This experience is jointly delivered by the Asia Pacific Student Accommodation Association (APSAA) and Association of College and University Housing Officers — International (ACUHO-I), and is modelled on the latter's National Housing Training Institute in the USA.
As part of one of the topics I taught, Reviewing your residential experience offering, I broke up the participants into small teams and ran a short case competition. The teams were allocated one of the hypothetical residences below and developed a pitch to win new funds from potential donation or grant. Each of the residences had its own history, challenges and opportunities.
Developing the case studies was fun but time-consuming. Giving each of them a unique history, context and set of pressing challenges that were realistic and reflected the diversity of providers in this sector required some careful calibration.
I wanted to share the case studies here so they could potentially save someone else the same effort in the future. All I would ask for in return is for the work to be properly attributed to me. And I would be delighted to be involved in your training session if you think I could be helpful (I really love training by the way).
Ruffle Towers
Ruffle Towers is an apartment style residence on the downtown/CBD campus of an urban institute of technology. The institute, Feather Institute of Technology (FIT), specialises in vocational courses like engineering, journalism, law, fashion, etc. and is known for having the closest coupling with industry in the way courses are designed and delivered of any university in the region. The institution is 41 years old and has been a commuter-only institution for its entire history, until it opened Ruffle Towers eight years ago.
When the institute established an accommodation department to manage Ruffle Towers, it didn’t have an overall strategy for its accommodation. More than anything else, the institute opened Ruffle Towers because it was responding to an attractive land acquisition opportunity on the edge of its main campus and the cost of capital was extremely low at the time. As a result, Ruffle Towers remains the university’s only residence to this day and the university has no plans to build more residences.
Ruffle Towers has 780 beds which are all in the style of share apartments in 3, 4, and 5-bedroom configurations. The building has many communal spaces totalling a whopping 29sqm per bed, however all of these spaces were caught up in a design fad at the time to have ‘blended’ spaces. That means that all the common spaces are designed to be able to be used for both study and socialising but come across as an awkward in-between. These blended spaces are scattered all throughout the building. Eight years on, these spaces are starting to look worn and students only use them for study purposes. Nobody is quite sure why – it may be the bright lego-like colours aren’t homely and inviting enough – and the head of department has been considering getting in a consultant to make recommendations for a renovation. The building has just one large common space that can hold 150 residents comfortably, however half of that space is outdoors and the climate of FIT’s city is very hot and humid.
Ruffle Towers has always had good student satisfaction. In its annual survey, every single aspect of the accommodation – from cleaning, to internet, to events and staff – ALL achieved 86-91% overall satisfaction ratings.
The budget to operate Ruffle Towers is considerable. The higher ups at FIT only expect the building to ‘wash its own face’ financially. That is, as long as loan repayments and the asset lifecycle plan is fully funded (sinking fund, preventative maintenance, etc.), all other funds are available for operations.
Your accommodation department reports through to a young and ambitious Pro-Vice Chancellor who keeps urging your management team to transform Ruffle Towers into something “innovative” and “game-changing”. However, your department also answers to an Accommodation SteerCo that acts like an internal board and makes all major decisions. The board is anxious to ensure that the Towers have broad appeal, being the institute’s only housing option. The PVC tells you not to worry about the board, she says “Henry Ford once said ‘If I asked the people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse’… the SteerCo will get on board when they see what we’re doing here”.
Ruffle College
Ruffle College is a 77-year old traditional residential college at a world top 30 ranked institution offering full catering and compulsory supplementary instruction to 414 residents. The college is part of The University of Feathers, which is a socially prestigious and research-intensive university. It also benefits from a widespread but unspoken understanding that it is the flag-bearing institution for its country. In other words, the university receives significant support from the government to help it to rise as high as possible in the world rankings.
The campus has 17 other residential communities besides Ruffle College. Each has its own well-established sense of purpose, identity and history. In terms of governance, the college is autonomous, self-funding, and takes direction from a college council. Two seats on the council are reserved for staff at the university, which have always been professors rather than administrators. Like the other colleges on campus, Ruffle College manages its own relationships with alumni, donors, and industry partners with whom it engages to create more opportunities for its residents.
Because there are so many residences at the university, each has evolved over the years to occupy its own niche and attract certain types of students. In fact, over the past two decades this has become a salient problem, because those stereotypes have become self-reinforcing. Ruffle College has always been known as the most academic of all the residential communities but, more and more, the college is attracting a homogenous group of students who tend to be entirely focused on academic achievement. These students have continued to reinforce the prestige of the college by winning University Medals and other accolades, however some long-standing college traditions relating to sport, the arts, and community service are at risk of stopping altogether because the residents see these as distractions from their studies.
This tension around this trend recently boiled over at the final formal dinner last year, where the President and Treasurer of the college’s alumni association openly criticised the leadership of the college at high table, calling the current student cohort “a bunch of battery hens” and their lack of interest in college traditions as evidence the college had “lost its way”. The president of the student club was seated at high table and has since relayed the argument to the entire student body, who think the old boys and old girls are “out of touch”. They say things were so easy for boomers who’d have no idea how much competition and pressure there is to get a good job these days.
Ruffle House
Ruffle House is one of three university-owned residences at a public university in regional Australia. Ruffle House is one of two residences are located at the university’s ‘main’ campus in a large regional centre called Feathertown, which has 90,000 people and is a 4.5 hour drive inland from the state’s capital city. Feathertown is a hub for the wider region and is considered the ‘last’ place with services such as a hospital, university, as well as private services like legal and accounting services. Populations any further inland are considered truly remote.
The university’s other residence is located at a smaller campus down the coast that used to be a college of advanced education specialising in commercial fishing and boatbuilding, which merged with the university 30 years ago. That campus is a 6 hour drive from Ruffle House.
Ruffle House was built with funds from the Universities Commission in the 1950s. The building has been maintained reasonably well by the long-serving facilities manager who retired last month after 26 years of service. Nevertheless, the building is now 70 years old and is reaching the end of its life. The building becomes unbearably hot on the frequent 40+ degree days, and the building leaks when it rains.
Ruffle House is home to 223 students who are almost entirely rural first-in-family students. Despite their common backgrounds, their aspirations vary significantly. Most residents drive their own car, work part-time jobs while studying. At a peer-to-peer level, there’s an emphasis on being tough, not whinging about mental health (or any other keywords for quitting), but making things happen for yourself. The House has a stunning track record of student completion rates. First year attrition has been 8% or less for 30 years now, 85% of its residents go on to complete their degrees (only been measured for the past 10 years), and – anecdotally – a huge proportion of alumni seem to go on to start their own small business a few years after graduating.
The Ruffle House residents’ association is highly autonomous, collecting its own fees and organising its own activities. The association organises the majority of events and activities available to residents of the House. The executive committee of the association is often dominated by the most social and outgoing residents and tends to suffer from groupthink. Occasionally, the association organises events which are not inclusive or risk-managed. When management disciplines the association this turns into an ugly, protracted conflict that lasts for the remainder of the academic year. The most recent of these was a pool party at the public pool. The residents smuggled a keg into the event and drank for 5 hours through sports bottles. One resident slipped on the edge of the pool and broke his arm. He says he was just being clumsy and doesn’t want to cause a fuss. The organising committee claims to have no advance knowledge of the keg, saying they found it when they were doing pack up.
In the past Ruffle House was known for its hazing practices during orientation week, but management stamped this out over the past few years. Ruffle House just won an award ‘Superstars in Student Wellbeing’ last year from a large professional association for the amazing turnaround in its student culture. On Friday last week, your Dean of Students was anonymously sent a screenshot of a post on a private social media account showing first year students on their knees binge drinking through alcohol-soaked cabbages. It looks like hazing. He seems to think the tough stance only drove the hazing underground.
The university knows it needs to rebuild or close Ruffle House in the next 10 years. The university doesn’t have the funds to do this itself, especially because the unit economics of Ruffle House (even if it was expanded through a redevelopment) cannot make such a project self-funding. Fundraising seems unlikely as the residents of Feathertown have been unimpressed with some of Ruffle House’s pub crawls over the years, and the House has lost track of its alumni by way of never having had (or needed) an alumni relations function. Senior management of the university has advised that a government grant is the only possibility and they will be lobbying for such a grant over the next two years. Feathertown is in a very safe seat held by a margin of more than 20%.
Ruffle Student Living
Ruffle Student Living (RSL) is a growing provider of PBSA-style student accommodation with beautiful, modern, and amenity-rich facilities – often including cinemas, gyms, rooftop gardens, games rooms, study rooms, and more. Students mostly live in premium studio apartments (buildings are 80% studios), enjoy unparalleled security and service via a 24/7 service desk.
Ruffle Student Living is a for-profit company. It is financed by a large equity investor, a mutual fund by Feathered Capital called the Southern Stars Diversified Property Trust, that wants exposure to the booming asset class that has been student accommodation. The agreed investment parameters between Ruffle and Feathered is that they should only develop property in large cities with 5 or more higher education institutions who all have a track record of recruiting international students. RSL has five locations: two in Sydney, and one in Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland. Ruffle is exploring a sixth location in Singapore but still needs to convince Feathered Capital that Ruffle’s offering will work in that market. Expanding to Singapore or another country beyond Aus/NZ is a key priority for RSL’s board of directors. The oldest location, Melbourne, opened in 2014.
RSL prides itself on outstanding customer service. Student satisfaction ratings and online reviews of RSL are immaculate and exiting students always cite the highly responsive service as their reasons for the high ratings, saying “it’s like living in a hotel”
Ruffle has always had a residential life program for its residents. Before the opening of the first building, RSL engaged a student affairs academic in Sweden to develop a research-led residential life framework for them. The framework, called Student Circles, says that students have many simultaneous needs – represented as circles – like security, sleep, nutrition, friends, encouragement to study, career opportunities, and down time(!). A good residence, therefore, will address these needs simultaneously. It never leaves a circle blank. There must always be a next activity planned for each circle.
In each residence, RSL employs seven Res Leaders (returning residents) on casual contracts (for approximately 10 hours per week) to run events and build community. The success of the Res Leaders program has varied a lot – both between properties and between years. The program seems to struggle with two obvious problems: when an activity is a success, it gets repeated over and over and again until it’s no longer interesting to the residents. And sometimes when team of Res Leaders produces something great, it gets taken away from them by head office.
A few years ago the Sydney team created a ‘green guerillas’ program where different floors battled it out for who could be the most sustainable. Head office and investors loved the program so much (because of the ESG narrative and the downward pressure on utilities) they made the program a national requirement across all properties.
For this year, head office announced two new requirements for the residential life program: no event could be repeated more than once per year unless it was a component part of a large, long-running multi-event program like ‘green guerillas’; and RSL wants to launch another big program like ‘green guerrillas’ but focusing on student nutrition and food security, so every team should make a large program in that area. The winning team will get a bigger budget for their Christmas party at the end of the year.
A key pillar of Ruffle’s corporate strategy has been to strike as many partnership agreements with higher education institutions as possible to reduce its reliance on agents. This has proven to be complicated in practice as different institutions have different attitudes to this. At almost every institution, there are different expectations with respect to student welfare, complaints management, privacy, co-branding, and commissions. Some universities want to perform regular audits to ensure compliance with their standards. Some institutions don’t like the Student Circles framework and want Ruffle to report against their own frameworks which use complicated student development theories (which are in academic journals behind expensive paywalls). Other than in Auckland, where the new pastoral care code applies, none of these agreements have been finalised yet. But everyone in the company has been told to expect them to be finalised soon – the CMO and Head of Commercial have been actively negotiating a dozen such agreements in the past two months. They want to sign at least ten before the end of the financial year.
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