Texas Multifamily Quotes

Student housing is not conventional multifamily with younger residents. Carriers rate it, restrict it and decline it as a separate habitational sub-class. Lease structure, turnover velocity, common-area use and life safety drive that separation more than construction class or roof age do.

Texas gives the class unusual room to run. Public institutions here enrolled almost 1.52 million students in fall 2025, up 4.5 percent from roughly 1.45 million a year earlier and close to 12 percent above fall 2021. That growth is uneven, and the direction of enrollment in your submarket is a business income question long before it is a marketing question.

The Texas Campus Markets Underwriters Track

• College Station: Texas A&M topped 80,000 students across all locations in fall 2025, with College Station alone above 74,000 in preliminary counts. It also announced a five-year pause on enrollment growth in January 2025, which matters if you are underwriting new beds.
• San Marcos: Texas State enrolled 44,596 students in fall 2025, a 9.6 percent jump and a fifth straight record. Fast growth in a small city pushes demand into older product never designed for by-the-bed leasing.
• Lubbock: Texas Tech reported 42,272 students at the twelfth class day of fall 2025, including more than 7,600 first-time-in-college students, the largest entering class in its history. Freshman-heavy years raise first-time-renter exposure.
• Denton: The University of North Texas went the other way, from 46,180 students in fall 2024 to 43,568 in fall 2025. Softening enrollment is what underwriters price hardest, because occupancy loss and deferred maintenance arrive together.
• The metro campuses: UT Austin, UT San Antonio and UT El Paso all added students in fall 2025, with UTSA up 2,453 and UTEP up 1,258, and UT Arlington enrolls more than 42,000.

Purpose-Built Versus Converted Product

• Purpose-built: Fannie Mae's dedicated student housing definition is a fair proxy for how the market sees the asset: shared living rooms with individually locked bedrooms, bed-by-bed leasing, student amenities, a mix weighted to two, three and four-bedroom plans, and generally within about a one-mile walk of campus or on an established shuttle route.
• Converted: A 1980s walk-up two blocks from campus that drifted to heavy student occupancy is a different risk at the same address, carrying whole-unit leases, original systems and no real access control.
• Why the label matters: Some markets write dedicated student housing and decline conventional properties with heavy student concentration. Others do the reverse. Misclassifying the property gets quotes pulled after inspection.

Texas geography still sets the property baseline underneath all of this. Hail frequency and roof settlement terms dominate the North Texas campus markets, and coastal windstorm certification governs anything near the water. Read Austin apartment insurance, Arlington multifamily insurance and Dallas multifamily property insurance, then call (512) 893-3795.

A student housing program looks like a conventional apartment program on the declarations page and behaves nothing like one in a claim. Four things diverge: how business income is measured, what the vacancy condition does over the summer, who owns the furniture, and where the liability sublimits sit.

Business Income Runs on the Academic Calendar

• The re-lease problem: Conventional loss of rents assumes a repaired unit can be re-leased on any date. Student housing cannot, because the leasing season that would have filled those beds closed months before the loss.
• Twelve months is the wrong limit: Eighteen to twenty-four months is the honest number here. Read the period of restoration language against your pre-leasing timeline, not a construction schedule.
• By-the-bed valuation: If the rent roll is built bed by bed, the business income worksheet has to be too. Fannie Mae accepts by-the-bed income and valuation where a property has two years of operating statements on that method.
• Nine versus twelve-month leases: Academic-year and full-year leases produce very different annual revenue at the same rent per bed, and reporting the wrong one misstates your limit.

Summer Vacancy, Furniture and Fixtures

• The vacancy condition: Standard commercial property forms restrict coverage once a building has been vacant beyond a set period, commonly 60 consecutive days, typically dropping vandalism, sprinkler leakage, glass breakage, water damage and theft.
• How it bites: A building emptied between lease terms or pulled offline for a summer renovation can cross that line quietly. Request vacancy permit or amended wording before the summer, not after.
• Furnished units are your property: Bedroom furniture, common-area seating and fitness equipment are business personal property you own, and on a several-hundred-bed asset that limit is often the most out-of-date figure on the declarations page.

Liability Is Where the Class Gets Priced

• Assault and battery: Underwriters across habitational have been excluding it from general liability, raising deductibles or attaching sublimits, and using crime analytics to restrict coverage by location. Added back by endorsement, it usually carries a lower sublimit and is often only available through surplus lines.
• Defense inside the sublimit: Check whether defense costs erode it. Courts enforce these limits as written; in one federal decision an assault and battery aggregate already exhausted defeated coverage for two underlying suits.
• New form language: ISO filed new general liability endorsements addressing actual or alleged assault or battery on a multistate basis with a January 1, 2026 proposed effective date, so they can already be showing up on your schedule. Compare endorsement schedules year over year, not just premiums.
• Abuse and molestation: Not automatic on habitational forms. With maintenance staff holding master keys to individually locked bedrooms, it should be a decision rather than an omission.

The Lines Student Operators Forget

• Auto and shuttles: A campus shuttle is part of what makes a property purpose-built to a lender and an auto risk to an underwriter. Owned shuttles, golf carts and staff using personal vehicles all have to land somewhere.
• Ordinance or law: Substantial repair to an older converted building triggers current code. Coverage A responds to the value of the undamaged portion you are forced to tear down, Coverage B to demolition cost, and Coverage C to the increased cost of rebuilding to current code.

For the property layer on the same schedule, our Texas wind and hail deductible guide covers percentage deductibles and roof settlement. Call (512) 893-3795.

The submission decides the price on this class more than the building does. A file that earns standard market pricing looks materially different from one routed to surplus lines, and the difference is usually documented life safety and controls rather than anything structural.

Why Some Standard Carriers Decline the Class

• Habitational is already tight: It remains one of the harder property segments in 2026, after reinsurance treaties tightened again at the January 1 renewals and admitted carriers non-renewed older frame buildings or pushed them to surplus lines.
• Student housing sits at the edge of appetite: Several carriers have exited the class or imposed strict restrictions, and a large share of accounts land in the wholesale and surplus lines channel.
• The frequency thesis: First-time renters sharing space with unrelated roommates, complete annual turnover, heavy common-area use and elevated social activity produce more claims per unit. That is the argument you are answering.

Fire Is the Life-Safety File

• The baseline: NFPA data for 2019 through 2023 shows an annual average of 3,231 structure fires in dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses and barracks, with 19 civilian injuries and 19 million dollars in direct property damage a year.
• It is a kitchen problem: Roughly three of four of those fires started in a kitchen or cooking area, cooking equipment was involved in nearly eight of ten, and unattended equipment was the most common contributing factor.
• The calendar: The American Red Cross puts the peak months for student housing fires at September and October, which lines up with move-in. Campus fire safety groups have also flagged e-bike, e-scooter and device batteries as a growing ignition source.
• What to show: Sprinkler and alarm inspection records, stovetop suppression or auto shut-off devices, a written lithium-ion charging policy, and documented fire safety orientation at move-in.

Texas Statutes That Shape a Student Property

• Smoke alarms, Property Code Section 92.255: At least one alarm in each separate bedroom, one in the corridor where several bedrooms share it, and one on each level of a multilevel unit. A four-bedroom student plan carries several times the obligation of a conventional one-bedroom, and the separate Section 92.258 duty to inspect at the start of possession and on tenant request cannot be waived by the tenant.
• Security devices, Sections 92.153 and 92.156: Window latches, a doorknob lock or keyed dead bolt, sliding door pin locks and handle latches or security bars, and a keyless bolting device and door viewer on each exterior door, all at the landlord's expense under Section 92.153, with exterior door locks rekeyed at the start of each new tenancy under Section 92.156. Staggered bed-level turnover makes those obligations fire on a rolling schedule.
• Pool yards, Health and Safety Code Chapter 757: It reaches multiunit rental complexes, two or more dwelling units under common ownership and management on the same or adjacent tracts, and covers permanent pools plus hot tubs and spas over 18 inches deep. Enclosures must be at least 48 inches high measured from the ground on the side away from the pool, and chain link is prohibited for new enclosures built after January 1, 1994.
• Gates specifically: Self-closing and self-latching, opening outward away from the pool yard, with latches generally at least 60 inches above the ground. On a student property the pool deck is the highest-severity amenity you own.

What Underwriters Ask For

• Security and operations: Security personnel, exterior lighting, camera coverage, staff training, alcohol policy, prior incidents, third-party security contracts, maintenance protocols, renovation history, loss runs, distance to campus and on-campus versus off-campus classification.
• Property documentation: Per-building roof age with permits and tear-off invoices defends replacement cost settlement in hail markets, and coverings meeting the UL 2218 Class 4 impact standard earn filed credits from most Texas carriers on the wind and hail component.
• Controls that read well: Bedroom-level access control, retained camera footage on parking and entries, a written guest and party policy with enforcement records, and a documented balcony and railing inspection program, since gatherings load balconies past normal residential use.

Compare Houston multifamily insurance, San Antonio multifamily insurance, Fort Worth multifamily insurance and Corpus Christi coastal apartment insurance, or call (512) 893-3795.