School Ties

When you live and work in College Station, Texas, it's pretty hard to ignore the teeming number of Texas A&M students who make this college town—and its neighbor, Bryan Station—their home. After all, there are more than 45,000 Aggies attending A&M. Unfortunately, the university only has room for 10,000 students to live on campus.

All those students in search of a place to call home are a phenomenon that home builder Randy French couldn't miss. So about eight years ago, French, president and owner of Stylecraft Builders in College Station, started putting up three- and four-bedroom houses specifically geared to the university rental market.

But what he soon found out is that, while college students were an almost guaranteed stable market, they come with their own set of issues. “People don't like living right next door to students, so we started putting our usual product—a three-or four-bedroom home with a front-loaded garage—in a separate section of each subdivision,” says French.

At first, parents were the primary buyers, making up 70 percent of the homeowners, with investors picking up the other 30 percent. Modestly priced houses in the area typically appreciate at a steady 3 percent to 4 percent per year, which made investing in a home for the kids financially viable, especially for those loyal legacy families with multiple children destined for A&M.

The cash flow was such that the rent paid by four students for a four-bedroom house—typically $400 apiece these days—covered the mortgage and then some. Over the years, the investment ratio has flipped; investors now account for 70 percent of buyers, with parents coming in at 30 percent.

So, from a cash-flow perspective, all was well in Aggieland. But things weren't looking so good back in the neighborhood. Over time it became all too clear which Stylecraft homes were filled with students and which were true single-family homes.

“One night I drove through one of those subdivisions and saw a sea of cars and pickups in driveways and parked on the street [in the student section],” French recalls. “The pizza delivery guy couldn't even get through. I said to myself, ‘This is nuts. We really shouldn't do this.'”

For Stylecraft's next project, French did a little tweaking, keeping that sea of cars and pickup trucks in mind.

“Kids don't care about a big backyard,” says French. “They just need room for a keg and a place to keep the Chihuahua. So we took the driveways and had them come up the front and around to the back, which worked much better. But we spent so much money on concrete that we could have built alleys. So the next gyration was parking in the back. By city specifications, it's not really an alley, but it works like one. That keeps the ugly part out of the way.”

Then French noticed that yard maintenance wasn't high on his students' to-do lists. “You'd drive around and see that this yard looked good, the next was mowed, and then the next one looked like it hadn't been mowed in weeks,” explains French. “So we said, ‘The next project needs to have a sprinkler system installed and a homeowners' association that will take care of mowing.'”

That's exactly what's in place at Style-craft's latest project, Southern Trace, a 30-acre neighborhood that's just four miles from the Texas A&M campus. It's where all of Stylecraft's student-related tweaking has come to fruition. Every one of the 108 four-bedroom homes, base-priced between $147,000 and $156,900, was sold before the first house was built. All will be filled with students. And, for a reasonable $65 monthly fee, the HOA will take care of the yards.

Stylecraft didn't have to change its standard floor plans much to accommodate the students at Southern Trace. Eric Wivagg, the company's in-house designer, re-tooled the three-bedroom plans into four bedrooms with four baths after the company found that three-bedroom, three-bath plans were the last to sell.

The living areas and kitchens aren't huge, says French, but “these are college kids. They all have different hours and come and go a lot, so the living areas didn't need to be that big. The kitchens aren't as large as they would be in a traditional single-family home, but college kids really just want a microwave, an oven, and a place to keep the beer.”

Where the company went to some trouble was with the elevations, which they tried to vary. Brick is king in Texas, but Stylecraft has had success with shaking up its neo-traditional elevations through strategic use of stone, different trim and front-door treatments, and Hardiplank. “Hardiplank has been great for us,” says French. “Even with our scorching summers, it keeps the paint well and lets us use some nice, bold colors.”

The company has also taken a stronger stand when it comes to which elevation gets built where, to help the neighborhood flow, French says. “We pre-determined which plan and which elevation would go on which lot,” says French. “We gave that to sales and said, ‘Here it is. If someone wants a particular elevation, it has to be on a particular lot.' That's helped us a lot on the production side, too.”

Southern Trace has been sold in three phases, with French pressing for a construction cycle that's closer to a 100-day turnaround. “Last year, with phase one, we noticed that we had houses sitting without anything being done for three or four days in a row, so we did a labor analysis,” he says. “We met with all our subcontractors and found out how many crews they could commit to us, how many rough-ins and trims they could do a week, and then did the math. That let us really get out and assess the resource load. Things have gone much smoother and in a more timely fashion. We should hit the 100-day cycle time on every house this year.”

Now, when French drives through the latest iteration of his student-oriented housing effort, he likes what he sees. There are 19 houses still left to be built in 2008, but right now Southern Trace can boast 49 completed homes and 40 under construction. Cars and pickup trucks (a favorite in Texas) are parked neatly behind each completed house, just beyond the tidy fenced-in backyard. The sprinkler systems are keeping the St. Augustine grass green.

And French has yet to see a repeat of something he spied one Monday morning at a previous project after what must have been quite the football weekend: a lawn chair on top of a roof.

Kathleen Stanley is a freelance writer based in Washington.

• Community: Southern Trace
• Total acreage: 30
• Date opened for sale: January 2006
• Product: Student-oriented four-bedroom homes; buyers can choose from four floor plans with three elevations each
• Price range: Base prices range from $147,000 to $156,900; homes rent for $400 per bedroom
• Total number of for-sale units at build-out: 108
• Sales to date: 108
• Builder/Developer/Architect: Stylecraft Builders, College Station
• Interior designer: Mary DeWalt Design Group, Austin, Texas
• Landscape architect: Robert Ruth Landscape Architect, College Station