Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is Education Realty Trust?Mr. Bower: Education Realty Trust is a one-year old REIT using as its basis the predecessor company Allen & O'Hara Inc. of Memphis, Tennessee, which has been in the student housing business for 42 years now. We sometimes say we pioneered the business of privatized off-campus student housing in this country. We have done a lot of projects over that long- time period. Presently, as a public company, we own 39 properties with about 29,000 beds. We count our industry by bed rather than unit because often the units are one, twos, threes and sometimes four bedroom apartments, so everything I say will deal with beds. We have 39 locations in our portfolio at this point in time. We also manage 20 additional properties at universities across the country. So in total, we have 59 locations, about 36,500 beds from coast to coast. We're primarily located in the Southeast, but we have property in California, Arizona, Texas and all the way up to Pennsylvania. It's an interesting business in that there are very few large-scale players like ourselves in an industry that has very appealing dynamics to it. The enrollments in colleges today are booming. This is the second wave of the baby boom. Their children are now going to college, so the demographics are huge. Basically, the schools can't handle the surge of students, so private companies that can provide housing for those students are highly sought after because that takes pressure off the school and allows them to use their limited resources for classrooms and libraries and computers and that sort of thing, so it is a very exciting business. We are often compared to the multifamily REIT sector. We really are a specialty REIT, but the closest parallel would be the conventional multifamily REIT.
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