Student housing in Archer: beds vs. units, pre-lease rent rolls, and edge cases

Overview

Student housing is one of the more complex property types in multifamily underwriting.

Archer has invested two years of development into solving student housing parsing challenges, and the platform handles the majority of student housing workflows automatically.

However, student housing has edge cases and nuances that can require manual intervention.

This article explains what Archer handles today, what's being improved, and what currently requires manual work.

What Archer handles automatically

In addition to parsing conventional rent rolls, Archer has built significant capabilities for student housing properties:

• Rent roll and pre-lease rent roll (PLRR) joining. When you have two files for the same property — a current rent roll and a pre-lease rent roll — Archer can join them automatically, matching units across files.
• Beds vs. units. Archer can treat the property at either a bed-level or unit-level grain. This adjusts comp data, stores the data at the correct level, and improves comp benchmarking across student housing properties.
• Pre-lease occupancy and forecasting. Archer calculates pre-lease occupancy rates, rental rates, and forecasted uplift over the current rent roll — the key metrics for evaluating student housing deals.
• Unit type reassignment. Archer can reassign unit types with additional codes like "en-suite" or "master lease" to create better average rent estimates that reflect the actual product being offered.
• BYOM integration. Archer automatically generates your populated model with the cleaned, parsed, and structured RR + PLRR data inserted — same workflow as conventional properties, just with student-specific data handling.
• Comp storage. Both the rent roll and PLRR are stored as new rental comps, available for future student housing deal analysis at both the bed and unit level of granularity.
• A video walkthrough of student housing parsing in Archer is available in the article "How do I parse a student housing Rent Roll?" in the In-App Parsing section of this Help Center.

Coming soon: charge code alignment

Sometimes the rent roll and PLRR use different charge code names (for example, "Lease Rent" on the RR and "Scheduled Rent" on the PLRR). Archer can line these up, but they can occasionally be misaligned. When that happens, it's not always obvious to the user how to fix it. We're making adjustments to the UI to make charge code misalignment easier to identify and correct.

Edge cases that require manual intervention

These are scenarios where the automated system can't make the right call without human input. In each case, you can either modify the source file before uploading, or use Archer's in-app bulk edit tools to make corrections after parsing.

• Different unit type codes between RR and PLRR. If the rent roll uses "A1" but the PLRR uses "A1-premium" for the same unit type, Archer can't automatically reconcile these. You'll need to edit the PLRR to align unit type codes before uploading, or use bulk edit within Archer to adjust them.
• University blocks and master lease rentals. When a PLRR shows one large payment under a single resident name (like a university block), but the dollars need to be spread across multiple units. Archer sees this as one lease, not a bulk arrangement. You'll need to average the rent across the covered units manually.
• One person renting all bedrooms. If one leaseholder covers all bedrooms in a unit with a single rent line, the system picks up one bedroom as pre-leased at full rent and the others as vacant. To get accurate occupancy and average rents, spread the rent across all bedrooms in the source file.
• PLRRs with historical renewal dates. If the PLRR lists historical dates for renewals rather than upcoming renewal dates, the pre-lease occupancy calculations will be off. Adjust the dates in the source file to reflect the expected upcoming renewal period.
• Mixed bedrooms and full units in one file. Archer is set up to handle either units OR bedrooms in a given file, not a mix of both. If your RR has some rows at the unit level and some at the bedroom level, you'll need to normalize the file — either split all units into bedroom rows, or combine bedroom rows into unit-level rows — before uploading.
• Roommates sharing a single bedroom. When two residents are listed under the same unit number as current occupants (shared bedroom), Archer's deduplication logic will only honor one. To capture the full rental rate for that bedroom, combine the roommates' rents into a single row for the primary resident.

Best practice for student housing

For the cleanest results, normalize your rent rolls before uploading. Decide whether you're analyzing at the bed level or unit level, make sure both files use consistent unit type codes, and consolidate any master-lease or roommate situations into single rows. This takes a few minutes and dramatically improves parsing accuracy.

If you run into a student housing scenario that doesn't fit these patterns, contact support@archer.re — our team handles student housing edge cases regularly.