The College Fix

It’s not quite a Back to School scenario, but real estate firms are noticing an interesting trend: More and more, parents are moving to the college town where their kids will be attending a higher education institution.

“We’re calling it our gap year,” parent Lori Osterberg says. “We’re here for now, with the possibility of extending throughout her college career. We’re taking it one year at a time.”

The Associated Press reports:

Coldwell Banker, the real estate firm, first noticed parents making such moves in 2008 while compiling its annual College Home Price Comparison Index that ranked average home prices in more than 300 college towns. David Siroty, a company spokesman, said the index has not been done in several years but anecdotally agents continue to see it pop up in home rentals and sales around the country near campuses.

Regina Santore, a Coldwell agent in Knoxville, the East Tennessee home of the University of Tennessee, relocated a couple last summer from a town about 380 miles away on the western side of the state so their freshman could live with them.

“They felt very strongly they did not want their daughter living on campus. They felt like she would have a better study environment if she were with them. She didn’t seem to have any problem with it,” Santore said.

“We do see parents moving here or buying a second house here, either because they have a child in school here or because they went to school here themselves,” Levy said. “We see people buying homes that are larger and more expensive than one would expect for a college student because they want to use the home when they come here to visit,” said Roslyn Levy, a Coldwell agent in Gainesville, Florida.

Sheila Baker Gujral, a Georgetown alum who interviews prospective students for that school, began noticing this trend just last summer:

“I was talking to this girl and asked how her parents were doing about her leaving,” Baker Gujral said. “She said, ‘They don’t mind living on the East Coast or the West Coast, so I’m applying to those places.’ I was, like, ‘Do you mean to tell me they’re going to move wherever you go to school’ and she said yeah. She didn’t look entirely thrilled about it.”

I went to a local school way back when, so my parents were already nearby. But if I had decided on a college across the country, I certainly wouldn’t have wanted my folks to move there.

Then again, since they were paying most of the college bills, who would I have been to argue?

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