Every spring, Harvard’s freshmen are sorted across 12 residential houses. But the children of the 0.1 percent have a 13th option: 1075 Massachusetts Avenue. With a tenant directory resembling the Forbes Four Hundred, the 20-unit building is the go-to off-campus option for nepo babies at the Ivy League college.
“It has been extremely popular, and the clientele we have is obviously a very upper-end clientele,” says developer Raj Dhanda, who bought the Harvard Square property in 2009.
For real-estate investors, luxe housing on elite college campuses is increasingly attractive. These buildings’ owners point to benefits such as the constant churn of well-to-do students (who recommend the housing to incoming ones) and complicated zoning laws that scare away rival developers. “Student housing has been the darling of the real-estate-investment community for several years now,” says Daniel Bernstein, the president and chief investment officer of the Philadelphia-based, multi-billion-dollar real-estate firm Campus Apartments.