Students who are living in campus apartment complexes may notice a new name on their leases. The university announced via email that the three campus apartment complexes had been purchased by a new owner.
Despite the shift in ownership, the university says that students will not see many changes in the day-to-day operations of the apartments. Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Rick Graycareck said nothing is going to change for students at the University of Indianapolis, and most of the change is from a management standpoint.
“The property management group is still there,” Graycarek said. “… Leases for students did not change. Lease rates that students were already signing back in February and January and March all stay the same, nothing changes from a student perspective.”
Graycarek said the new ownership agreement gives the university a path to full ownership of the apartments. Graycarek also said that the conditions of the contract between the university and the new owners state that once the debt on the buildings is paid off, the university will take over full control of the apartments. Even though the apartments are on campus, they have never been fully owned by the university like residence halls. When the apartment complexes were built, former UIndy president Robert Manuel and the board of trustees entered an agreement with a private capital company, Strategic Capital Partners, where UIndy would provide the land and the partner company would oversee the construction and management of the properties, with the university taking a minority ownership in the buildings.
Strategic Capital Partners is a real estate development company out of Carmel which, according to its website, owns multiple properties across the city, and were also hired by UIndy to build the Health Pavillion. According to Graycarek, the company’s decision to sell was most likely based on the hope to make a return on their initial investment in constructing the properties.
“They were financed through a lot of investors,” Graycarek said. “I think like any company, at some point, investors would like to see a return on their investment, and because a lot of the return is locked up in equity, the only way to unlock the equity is to sell the properties.”
When the former owners decided to sell, the university was initially approached to buy the properties outright. The university instead decided to seek out a new partner and landed on Provident Resources Group, or PRG, a property management group based out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. According to PRG’s website, it manages properties at the University of Washington, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Louisiana State University and Howard University. Even though they have not been partnered with the UIndy very long, Graycarek said they have been great to work with and that he is pleased with the partnership so far.
According to Director of Residence Life Rita Wiley, the day-to-day operations of the apartments should see no changes in the foreseeable future. Wiley said the new owners and the former partners are essentially non-existent in any day-to-day functions of the properties. The UIndy apartments also employ Peakmade Real Estate, an apartment management company that oversees maintenance and general upkeep of the properties. Peakmade will continue to manage the apartments, as they have two more years remaining on their contract.
“The most important thing really is, from a student perspective, there is zero change,” Graycarek said. “I think the attention and the influence the university will have over the day-to-day operations of students living in those apartments are going to be really impactful.”
