Amarachi Uche & Victoria Romanczyk | GNP contributors
It is a big change to go from living at home or in a college dorm to living on your own in an apartment complex.
Jacob Coman knows. “It was weird at first, having my own place, but I adjusted and now I can’t see myself living anywhere else. If you can, definitely try it out,” the ECU student says. He now lives at University Park on 10th Street in Greenville. It’s a short walk to campus.
Ana Gonzalez lives at The Province just across the street from ECU. “I think we’ll have tons of people moving in soon, and they want to be safe and secure, and I think they will be, and they will be happy where they are living,” she says.
That, however, is only the sometimes happy story of off-campus living.
In 2001, on move-in day, ECU student Camille Leake opened the door of her apartment at Copper Beech and found bugs, mold and dirt, she says. Janelle Jacobs says her off-campus apartment smelled of mildew and wasn’t fully furnished.
In 2022, on move-in day, Kim Chapple spent six hours cleaning her daughter’s room at 33 East. Both student-housing complexes are about three miles from ECU’s downtown campus.
In 2023 Bernadette Wadell of Charlotte had mixed feelings about moving her son into off-campus student housing in Greenville. She wanted to make sure her son Xavier Wright would not be left to fend for himself at his apartment in The Horizon on Greenville Boulevard.
“I had so many questions,” says Wadell. “I wondered who to speak to about security, events, and other things around the apartment. Do I speak to the owners of the property?”
She could try, but the owners of off-campus student apartments in Greenville are not easily reachable.
The Greenville News Project went looking for the owners of 15 of Greenville’s largest student apartment complexes. It found that all but one complex is owned by out-of-town corporations. It found that student housing is a multi-billion dollar investment industry. It is a global industry too.
The industry
In the greater real estate industry there is a specialty sector called "student housing" that targets college and university students. The sector has experienced a tremendous expansion in recent years due to rising enrollment rates and an increase in student demand for high-end but reasonably priced accommodations.
The national inventory of off-campus student housing grew by over 56% over from 2007 to 2017, says a city of Greenville consultant’s report. In 2022, investors spent $1.6 billion on student housing complexes across the United States, according to an estimate by the investment service CBRE.
Over the years the student housing industry has evolved to include a wide range of amenities and services. Student Housing Business magazine reports that the most popular amenities are fitness centers, swimming pools and study lounges.
Location also plays a big role. In 2017, the national average rent for complexes less than a half mile from campus was $672. From a half mile to 1 mile, rent averaged $553. At more than a mile away from campus, rent averaged $537.
In Greenville in 2017, nearly 60% of off-campus student housing was more than two miles away from ECU’s downtown campus, the consultant’s report says. That year rents averaged $916 for a close-to-campus single-bedroom unit to $760 further out. Rents drop as the number of bedrooms in the layout increase.
Since then, several new and huge student housing complexes opened in Greenville, and they are all close to campus.
The owners
GNP searched Pitt County’s online property records to find the owners of Greenville’s 15 biggest student housing complexes. It made multiple attempts to contact those owners. Here is what GNP found:
- Campus Pointe, owned by Campus Pointe Apartments LLC of Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. It did not respond to GNP’s requests for an interview.
- Carolina Creek, owned by C Creek Apartments of Gilbert, Arizona. It too did not respond.
- Eastern on 10th, owned by Preiss College View JV LLC of Raleigh. It too did not respond.
- Gather Uptown, owned by Greenville Uptown Propco LLC of Denver, Colorado. It too did not respond.
- Pirate’s Cove, The Voyager, Horizon, The Bower and the Quarterdeck, owned by various numbered versions of EWT LLC in Concord, New Hampshire. Its namesake, Eaton W. Tarbell Jr., responded. “Well, if there are any questions, I'll try to explain them,” he told GNP. “I'm not a complicated guy. I'm a simple common sense person.”
- Proximity at 10th and The Boundary, owned by Taft Ward Investments in Greenville. It did not respond to GNP requests for an interview.
- The Jolly Roger, owned by JRR Ventures in Raleigh. It too did not respond.
- The Landing, owned by Landing ECU LLC of Champaign, Illinois. It too did not respond.
- The Province, owned by BSHPG LP in Georgia. It too did not respond.
- University Edge & Dickinson Lofts, owned by Sunbelt Portfolio II LLC of Houston, Texas. It too did not respond.
Accidental owner
Eaton Tarbell is a business tycoon in the student housing industry, exclusively in Greenville. He owns five off-campus student housing locations around ECU.
“The student housing aspect of this was something we stumbled into. We didn't know much about that,” he told GNP.
Despite stumbling into student housing, the 81-year-old Cornell graduate is no novice when it comes to real estate, and he still practices family law in New Hampshire. But he mainly spends his time saying “yes” or “no” to business propositions presented to him by his son, Miles Tarbell.
Eaton Tarbell started his real estate journey by buying a few small rental units in New Hampshire and then Maine. The problem with owning real estate property that far north is the weather. Winter months up north mean high bills for heating oil. Tarbell says he does not to allow his northern tenants to pay for their own heat oil because “that’s the first thing they’ll skip paying when they're running out of money.”
In an attempt to avoid the high cost of heating oil in Maine, the Tarbells brought their real estate investment interests down south to Greenville. Easton and Miles own over 9,000 multifamily housing units across New Hampshire, Maine and North Carolina, and they manage them all through their Keystone Management Company.
The Tarbell’s Keystone, in New Hampshire, is not the same as Greenville’s Keystone Property Management.
Miles Tarbell says his company is doing some renovations at the Greenville properties. He says the company is doing well with its leasing, but that it wants to make student living more inclusive and interactive.
The students
While the Tarbells mostly own conventional multifamily housing units, Miles says “renting to students is just more fun. You get to make T-shirts, have events and have food trucks. We just really enjoy that.”
The students, he adds, are younger than the company’s typical renter, and “they are excited to be there.”
Nick Porter, CEO and founder of Yugo, an international student housing management platform, says families put a lot of time and energy into raising their children at home, and it shouldn’t be any different when deciding a college student-housing complex for them.
“Education is a huge focus for families,” says Porter. “Through that, we’re the benefactors by providing great communities for people to live there safe and securely and in great locations.”
Uche and Romanczyk reported this story for the Spring 2023 class, In-depth Reporting Capstone.
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