It’s a renter’s market in this college town

REXBURG, Idaho – College students looking for housing have the upper hand in a rental market with far more rooms and apartments than there are bodies to fill them.

Some apartment complexes are offering free long-distance phone calls, vaulted ceilings and heated floors in an effort to entice renters.

Meanwhile, real estate owners and managers are struggling to keep vacancies down in a city where there are an estimated 1,400 empty private apartments.

“We just keep giving and giving and giving,” said Cindy Sharp, manager of Colonial House apartment complex. “This year we just have too much housing.”

Last fall, Colonial House had 13 vacancies. Earlier this fall, there were more than 80 empty units expected as the first day of school approached.

Rexburg’s apartment market has boomed since Brigham Young University-Idaho made the transition to a four-year university beginning in 2001.

Several new housing complexes have opened, with three targeting single students in the past year. Those three complexes alone added 800 units.

“It only took that many to push us over what the need is,” said Sharon Tuckett, director of housing at BYU-Idaho.

The vacancy rate last semester was 15.6 percent. Figures have not been compiled for this semester, but Kurt Hibbert, the city’s planning director, said he’s heard of vacancies as high as 40 percent in some complexes.

Students are also likely to keep moving as landlords give them more choices and new perks, such as oil-rubbed bronze, European light fixtures and 10-foot ceilings, which renters at the all-women Tuscany Place can rent for $1,225 a semester.

That’s not to mention perks like standard DSL and phone lines in each bedroom, free utilities, entertainment centers with 27-inch televisions and DVD/VCR players for each apartment, and tanning salons on location.

Tuscany Place, the newest apartment complex in town, put heated tubes into the floors to keep tiles and carpet warm in the frigid eastern Idaho winters.

“It’s really nice to have heated tile when you get out of the shower,” complex manager Jonna Wintch said.

For some renters, most of the amenities don’t matter much.

“Heated floors, heck, I don’t care about that,” said Hailey Klingler, a resident at Tuscany Place.

Klingler simply wanted to live in a newly constructed building – for about the same price as her old apartment. Most of the amenity offerings from the complexes don’t strike her as necessary, she said.

Overbuilding isn’t the only factor contributing to high vacancies. The rising number of married students is, too, because they don’t have to live in university-approved housing.

Four years ago, about 6 percent of the students were married, Tuckett said. By last winter, that number had climbed to 25 percent, and it is expected to be similar this fall.

Despite the vacancy rates, some people see more room for growth in the future.

“What’s overbuilt today may not be overbuilt tomorrow,” Hibbert said.