Rob Bronstein of the Scion Group: 5 Questions

If there’s one way America’s student housing sector has changed over the past three decades, it’s simply that everything is just much more competitive. Information is more accessible, students (and their parents) are savvier, and there’s a lot more players in the game, according to Rob Bronstein, co-founder and CEO of The Scion Group.

Since launching in 1999, Scion has beat out the growing competition in the sector by becoming the largest privately held owner and operator of student housing in the U.S. — and potentially the world — with a portfolio spanning 190 communities and nearly 118,000 beds across 94 university markets.

In May, Scion also completed the largest student housing deal in the U.S. so far in 2026. Working with private equity giant Ares Management, Scion acquired from Harrison Street Asset Management a 12-property housing portfolio — including 7,578 beds across 10 states and 12 universities — for $910 million.

Not long after that, Scion announced in early June that it would acquire the operating business of Student Quarters (SQ), an Atlanta-based student housing operator with approximately $1.5 billion in assets. SQ’s portfolio comprises roughly 13,000 beds across 21 markets.

Commercial Observer sat down with Bronstein in late June to discuss Scion’s bullish approach to acquiring new assets, which markets the company is looking to expand into, and the state of the current student housing market in the U.S.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: What’s the history of Scion? What has kept Scion a big player in student housing?

Rob Bronstein: I started the company in late 1999. I’ve only actually had one other job since being an adult — I was a commercial tenant rep broker at a company here in Chicago from 1996 to 1999, and knew I didn’t want to do that and I wanted to start my own thing.

It wasn’t like I had some great love of student housing, but two things happened.

No. 1 is during my time at that firm, we worked on two transactions for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They were billed to lease student housing buildings at a 220-bed building and a 600-bed building that opened in 1997. That opened my eyes to it.

And, then, of course, for the industry overall, you had the millennials, or 75 million people born between 1980 and 1995, the oldest of whom started going to college around that period of time. They were second or third generation, they grew up probably with a little more space and privacy and affluence than prior generations, and very, very little had been built on college campuses since the baby boomer students. There was actually kind of a trough of demand in the preceding 15 or 20 years, so that’s how Scion came to be, and that’s how the industry came to be.

It’s funny, we’re now 118,000 beds and 190 communities, and the largest student housing owner globally. But, for the first 15 years or so, our company was doing consulting work directly for colleges and universities and very, very slowly building a portfolio.

I think that gave us a deep knowledge of what the students and the universities were looking for, but it was obvious that consulting just really wasn’t what we were focused on anymore, and we sold that to an architecture firm called CannonDesign at the end of last year. We just continued to build out our own portfolio, and, coming out of COVID-19, we’ve been building an operating platform that is big, sophisticated, uses scale, and uses technology.

Like any industry that is nascent and then becomes more sophisticated, you’re gonna have winners and losers, and at this point I think you need real scale, you need a different kind of capital. We couldn’t do today what we did 10 or 15 or 20 years ago — the bar is so much higher, and I feel very fortunate that we were riding the crest of the wave.

How has the student housing sector changed the most over the past 27 years?

It’s become more competitive in every way since that time.

We will soon have around 6,000 beds at Texas A&M University. There’s something like 35,000 beds of comps, including ours, that we’re tracking in Texas A&M. So the choice that the prospective residents and their families have is vastly more than it was. There’s way more access to information. The students are very savvy about who’s got a good reputation, who offers good value, who’s discounting. Everything is just faster and harder.

Trust me, we like that a lot. There’s more competition, and the amount of resources that we need to support our properties just goes up and up and up all the time. The residents themselves have very high expectations, and the speed at which they expect you to respond to their maintenance requests is going faster all the time.

What U.S. markets have been most successful for Scion, and would you ever acquire assets in more urban areas?

We buy in portfolios. We’re at half the Ivy League schools — we’re at Dartmouth, Penn, Cornell and Brown. But, if you ask me, I would say we focus on big public universities. We’re at about 93 campuses, and there’s probably 125 that are worth owning.

What we really like are large public systems in growing states, and, if they have a STEM focus, even better. We either prefer the flagship or one tier below the flagship, because they represent a very prestigious, nationally and internationally desirable brand for the diploma that people are seeking out. They’re very elastic as far as that demand, but also to the extent that should enrollment fall off, that’s where there’ll be a flight to quality. 

And then the reason we like a tier right below the flagship is very often the flagship can and will cap its enrollments.

Using Texas as an example, there’s four or five other campuses in the state of Texas that are benefiting from excess demand that can’t get into UT Austin. The most obvious being Texas State and San Marcos, which is 30 minutes up the road. A lot of students go there because they want even just to be close to Austin on the weekends.

We have a big presence at the University of Florida and at Florida State, the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State, the University of Alabama and at Auburn, but also at UA Birmingham. So, by and large, we like where the degree represents a lot of value for one’s tuition power. The best, most pristine example is an engineering degree from a public university that you pay in-state tuition.

What we don’t like is a liberal arts degree from a four-year college in a quaint area, where people are going to question whether or not they’re getting value for that.

As far as urban areas, we own in Philadelphia, we own in Chicago, we own in different areas of Los Angeles, and Austin, as I mentioned.

Most of the big state schools tend to be more in campus towns. What’s happened in these campus towns is they have become really appealing places for people to work and live, sort of even beyond the school itself. So Madison, Wis.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Boulder, Colo.; Gainesville, Fla.; Oxford, Miss. If you look at the best places to live in the United States, it’s a lot of college towns, because they’re vibrant and young, and there’s job creation.

Tell me more about the Harrison Street Asset and Student Quarters deals.

They do represent the yin and the yang of what we’re doing.

We have found there to be a lot of value in acquiring portfolios. It’s efficient for our capital. It’s efficient for sellers. There’s a pricing power as the buyer and showing up and buying whole portfolios. So it’s an efficient way to grow.

One of the reasons why we like working with Harrison Street, who we bought this portfolio from, is it was jointly curated. I think they offered us 25 or 30 properties, and we were able to have a meeting of the minds on 12. This was our seventh or eighth large portfolio transaction.

The Student Quarters was actually only the second company that we’ve ever bought in our history. The first one was 10 years ago, University House Communities. A lot of time and a lot of effort went into crafting what it all looked like. I’m really, really happy with the deal that we made, and I think it’s a great template for other owners of smaller student housing companies, and also for their limited partners. 

We purchased the entirety of the operating company — they have asset management, property management and construction management, and we bought all those 100 percent. They’re really excited about the idea of a company that’s 10 times the size of Student Quarters and has all these resources, who’s putting their own money next to the limited partners. We’re risking our capital to create that alignment, and we’ve told them, “If you want to exit in the near term, let us know, but if not, we think we can drive some real upside.”

How do you see student housing evolving over the next few years? Is there enough student housing?

These thoughts keep me up at night. “Are we gonna run out? How long is our runway?” 

There is a real shift going on in higher ed toward the bigger schools and public universities. I don’t think you can be bullish enough, honestly, on top-tier public universities. Even the Ivys have lost a lot of their luster compared to these top-tier public universities.

Some of the most desirable schools right now in the country are University of Florida, Ole Miss, University of Alabama, with students from all over the country wanting to go there, so we feel really, really good about having the investments we do in these markets, and we’ll aggressively do more.

There is a much-needed consolidation that needs to happen in higher education. There’s a lot of smaller schools that probably won’t be around in 10 years. And there definitely is a shortage of on- and off-campus student housing — modern and attractive student housing, and a lot more people are competing for where students would have been living 10 years or 20 years ago. The top schools are growing and growing and growing, and that makes me nervous there’s a risk of oversupply at the high end of the market.

The two sorts of barbells of risk are schools that just will not be long-term viable — smaller, lower-tier schools that just can’t sort of make the case — and the biggest schools will just get bigger and bigger, and the risk there is that is there just too much demand and will things get too expensive.

But the market will speak.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.