CHICAGO—The Opus Group in partnership with The Carlyle Group has just started construction on a new 14-story student living community on the edge of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. Demand for new luxury student housing like this has been quite robust for several years, but company officials say subtle changes are underway in the sector, and developers need to offer more than simple luxury.
“Students are no longer interacting socially or intellectually in the same way,” Ben Angelo, senior director, real estate development, Opus Development Co., LLC, tells GlobeSt.com. Much like millennials in the workplace, today's students now want to have a range of spaces for communal use. Opus has designed much of this project's amenity space with that in mind.
And developers are choosing creature comforts more carefully these days. “Years ago, we just tried to create as many amenities as we could,” Angelo says. But observation showed that many of these perks, such as tanning beds, went out of favor.
Recommended For You
Want to continue reading?
Become a Free ALM Digital Reader.
Once you are an ALM Digital Member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking commercial real estate news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical coverage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
*May exclude premium content© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
