A Practitioner's Guide to Bed-Weeks, RevPAB, Nomination Agreements and the Rent Roll That Is Re-Sold Every September
Julian R. Sterling
These are the companion files of Student Housing Real Estate by Julian R. Sterling.The book on Amazon →
520 beds in Leeds, six room types, one rent roll that expires on the same day every
year and has to be sold again from nothing, offered at £46.5 million and worth £41.7 million on the book’s arithmetic. The rate card says £192.98 a week. The
revenue a bed actually earns is £173.61. The gap is 10.0 per cent, and no yield in the pack discloses it.
These are the four workbooks the book was written from, corrected and completed: the model now reproduces
269 of the book’s figures, each against a live formula, on the sheet that closes it. Around them: the same four
with the inputs emptied, twelve working documents to print, forty questions that mark themselves, and three cases
the book names and never takes to a number. Nothing is locked, protected or watermarked.
Twelve workbooks, the printable documents and the read-me. Each group below can also be
downloaded on its own. Last revised 24 September 2026.
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These carry the book’s own figures, so that every number it prints can be traced to a live formula. Each now closes on a checks sheet.
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The whole book
The Student Housing Model
The model every figure in the book is computed from: 520 beds across six room types, the rate card against what is actually collected, RevPAB on both bases, the rate-and-occupancy trade, the summer with its VAT and council tax, the refurbishment cycle and the ten-year cash flow. On the scheme in the book the headline rate is £192.98 a week and the revenue a bed actually earns is £173.61 — a gap of 10.0 per cent that no yield discloses. Overwrite the tape and every figure moves with it.
Revised: the first version computed twenty-one of the book’s figures, and no formula read the elasticity. Seven sheets now carry the rest — the rate-and-occupancy trade, a point of occupancy, the nomination, the city and a competitor, the debt, a scenario engine that re-runs the ten-year value for every sensitivity and inversion, and affordability — and the checks sheet compares 269 printed figures. Three are corrected: deferring the refurbishment keeps no summer, it moves one (the summer is worth £2,209 of the £196,120, not £47,512); one bad September is £143,493 on the price basis, 4.4 per cent of a permanent miss, not £135,380 and 4.2; and one swing in Chapter 4 is 1.12 per cent, not 1.11.
Week by week from January to the November census, on the four lines the book says to monitor: beds reserved against the same week last year, achieved rate by room type, the gap by room type, and cancellations. It projects RevPAB from the current booking pace and prices every point still to sell — £39,600 of net operating income a point on this building, £681,613 of value.
Revised: the first version carried three of those four lines. It now takes cancellations, shows the beds still to sell by room type with what one unlet bed of each costs, and prices the points still to sell against the occupancy the budget needs.
The cost base per bed, line by line, with the energy exposure an all-inclusive rent creates, the lag before it can be repriced, and the level at which it eats the management fee. The margin on this scheme is 65.7 per cent; at the top of the energy and insurance ranges it is 62.9, which the model computes on its cost sheet. Revised: the level at which energy erases the fee is now computed (a 42 per cent rise), and the vacancy sheet reads its rate, weeks and beds as inputs and nets its revenue of arrears.
The bridge from asking price to bid, the four inversions of Chapter 20 — including the one that has no solution at any occupancy — and the omissions table to put on the facing page, laid out as a one-page committee paper. Revised: the discount now comes on both conventions, 10.2 per cent against the asking price as quoted and 8.8 per cent once it carries the same inherited-cycle deduction as the bid.
The four workbooks with every input emptied. The checks sheets count what is still missing and test what holds for any inputs.
The whole book · Chapters 6, 10, 11, 19 and 20
Your tape, your campaign, your costs, your bid
The model with its tape and all seventy-four assumptions emptied, and the tracker, the cost benchmark and the bid sheet with theirs. The steps stay: the elasticities, the points missed, the new beds, the covenant occupancies, the energy moves and the scenario shocks. Everything downstream waits until the last input is in.
The book’s inputs are listed in a text file inside the archive. Type them back in and the book’s figures come back with them: £173.61 of RevPAB, £2,698,619 of net operating income, a price of £41,728,378 that leaves the target return.
Twelve pages to print and use. A4, with margins wide enough for US Letter.
Chapters 3 to 24 · Appendix D
Twelve working documents
The first meeting on one page. Three rates by room type. The discount decision, targeted or general, against the elasticity. The campaign week by week. The nomination offer, priced on the beds it covers. The summer as a separate business, with its two taxes. The cost base per bed and the energy short position. The capital cycle. The city before the visit. The debt on both prices. The management agreement. The committee paper in ten sections.
Each page carries the book’s own figure in a note where one exists, so a filled page can be read against it.
A workbook that marks itself. Answer in the yellow cells; the marking fills in as you go.
All parts of the book
Forty questions on the book
Seven on rates, RevPAB and occupancy, seven on the campaign and a point of occupancy, seven on the nomination, the summer and the costs, seven on capital, the city and the value, six on the debt, the bid and the levers, and six on the three cases below. Numbers are marked to a tolerance, multiple choice to the letter, and the score sheet counts your errors part by part: that is your revision list.
Nothing is hidden. The marking sheet holds every answer, every tolerance, and the reason for each answer.
New material, not a restatement. Three situations the chapters name and never take to a number. Each case is one workbook: the note is the first sheet, the model is the rest, and a checks sheet closes it. Type your own figures in and every finding recomputes.
Chapters 8 and 11 · Case one
The majority nomination
A nomination over most of the building moves the block to Class M and takes the summer’s council tax off the table. On the smallest majority, 261 cluster beds, it costs £5,162,806 of value with the summer taxes carried and the summer shrinking with the beds; Class M gives back £182,424 of it. The yield would have to tighten by 61.5 basis points, against 31.7 for the 130-bed offer once its lost summer is counted (ADDED: the majority, and the summer following the beds). The tax is a tie-breaker, not a reason.
Chapters 6, 16 and 20 · Case two
The inherited September
The buyer does not run the first campaign. With 338 beds reserved at exchange against 380 a year earlier (ADDED), the census lands at 86.1 to 88.7 per cent. One inherited September is worth £278,073 to £368,344 on the price basis; capitalising the same shortfall asks for £5,505,335 to £7,292,541, which is the miss repeated for 47 Septembers. The answer is a retention released against the census, not a yield.
Chapters 12 and 21 · Case three
Re-mixing at refurbishment
Chapter 21 declines to price a re-mix because it would need a view on demand. Eighteen seven-bed flats into ninety studios (ADDED) add £62,134 a year of net income, net of the cycle, at the book’s rates and occupancy: the re-mix can carry £11,883 of conversion capital per studio and no more. At 30,000 a studio it would need a studio rate 11.2 per cent higher. That is the view, as a number.
Blue on pale blue is an input you may edit. A yellow fill is the carrying assumption of
the sheet — the one to argue about first. Black is a formula. Nothing is locked,
protected or watermarked. There are no macros and no external links.
The model workbook ends with a sheet called Checks: the figure as the book prints it,
the figure the workbook computes, the variance and a status, for 269 figures. The other three workbooks end on a
checks sheet of their own that tests what holds for any inputs, and every file ends ALL OK. In the three cases, a figure the
book does not give is marked ADDED wherever it appears. If a line ever reads
“to check”, the workbook and the book have drifted apart — and the workbook is
right.
Three numbers to compute on your own scheme
Revenue per available bed — and say which base. Everything collected
over the 44 academic weeks, divided by beds times those weeks, is £173.61 here, against a rate card of
£192.98. Everything collected over the whole year, divided by beds times fifty-two, is £151.83. Both are
right; a pack that quotes one without naming the denominator is not.
What a point of occupancy costs to buy. A point is worth £39,600 of net operating
income and £681,613 of value here — and the discount that buys it is charged to every bed, not
only to the one still empty.
The supply already consented in the town. 33,900 purpose-built beds against 68,400
students, with 2,450 more under construction: 67.0 beds per hundred students living away from home today (49.6 per
hundred students of every kind), and 71.8 once the pipeline lands, inside three years.
One warning, because it decides the answer
Occupancy in student housing is not a measurement. It is a price the operator chose to pay.
Across the whole range of rate this operator can actually use, occupancy moves 11.5 points while revenue
moves 3.9 per cent — so a scheme reporting 96.8 per cent tells you almost nothing until you know the rate that
bought it. Worse, at an elasticity of 0.907 the whole walk from floor to ceiling is exactly
break-even, and at 0.968 a small discount at the margin is: two thresholds that look like one
number and are not. Neither depends on the elasticity itself — one is set by the ceiling and the floor, the
other is the occupancy rate — so change the elasticity on sheet 3 of the model and watch sheet 12 move the
building from one side of them to the other.
What changed, and when
24 Sep 2026
The four workbooks corrected and completed. The model computed 21 of the book’s figures and now reproduces 269, with seven new sheets and a scenario engine; its Read me promised the summer taxes and an elasticity that no formula read. Corrected in the book: the summer’s share of the deferral gain is £2,209, not £47,512 (Chapter 12); one bad September is £143,493 and 4.4 per cent, not £135,380 and 4.2 (Chapter 20); a swing of 1.12 per cent, not 1.11 (Chapter 4). Corrected on this page: the asking price is £46.5 million, not £41.7; one inversion has no solution, not two. The tracker takes cancellations, the benchmark computes the fee-erasing energy rise, the bid sheet gives both conventions. Added: a blank set, twelve working documents, forty questions that mark themselves, three cases, and each workbook on its own.
How do you calculate RevPAB for student housing?Rent collected divided by available bed-weeks: £182.93 over 44 academic weeks, £174.43 over 52, on a scheme whose rate card averages £201.75. Always name the base.
How do you value student accommodation per bed?Capitalise NOI, then divide by beds: £7,200 a bed at 5.50 per cent is £122,574 a bed. The same price on a £5,400 scheme overvalues it by 39.4 per cent.
How do you calculate a city's student-to-bed ratio?Students living away from home divided by purpose-built beds: 36,400 / 18,400 = 1.98 per bed, not the 3.34 of counting every student, and 1.58 after the pipeline.
Is a rebooking discount worth it in student housing?Only on incremental rebookers: £6 a week off nets £5,252 on a 520-bed scheme at a 32% rebooking rate, but breaks even only above 28.8% of eligible residents.
Closing the DealTwo defensible bridges 20.70 million apart, a peg worth 7.00 million, and the six choices that remove 6.60 of a 12.00 earn-out.
CMBS and CRE CLOsWhere the loss actually lands, from appraisal reduction to realised severity, and what the B-piece is really being paid for.
How to Read a Commercial LeaseThe three refinements chapter 19 names and never performs, and the renewal rate below which the mark-to-market is worth nothing.
How to Read a Credit AgreementWhere the default actually comes from, the cure that costs 5.5 times the other, and the capacity nobody adds up.
How to Read a Real Estate Loan AgreementThe cure ratio in closed form, the four-point window in which the cheap cure works, and the cure sized to the wrong threshold.
Office Real EstateA six per cent yield that returns 3.2 per cent once the re-letting cycle is paid for, and the headline-to-net-effective rent arithmetic.
Private Equity Real EstateBoth worked waterfalls to the dollar, the two capital stacks, and the arithmetic of the promote made changeable.
Private Markets PerformanceThirty-one of the thirty-three figures chapter 19 publishes reproduce exactly — and the two that do not are named rather than quietly adopted.
Raising a Real Estate FundThe chapter 17 funnel run on a calendar — when the first close actually lands, and why more travel does not help.
Real Estate Financial ModelingProperty, development and fund models built line by line, and the modelling test worked end to end.
Real Estate Fund ManagementThe waterfall of 6.11, the build-to-core of 8.7 and the proceeds gap, reproduced as live formulas rather than asserted.
REIT Analysis and ValuationFFO of 532.0, AFFO of 381.0, net asset value and dividend safety — every figure a formula you can change.
Retail Real EstateThe occupancy cost of every unit in a centre, the sixteen per cent of the rent roll no tenant can sustain, and the right-size-convert-or-hold decision priced.
Sale and LeasebackA €179.5 million transaction end to end, with rent cover measured on the entity that actually signs the lease.
Self-Storage Real EstateThe cohort engine behind a 590-unit store, and the rate increase on existing customers priced against the move-outs it causes.
The Fund Finance ProfessionalChapter 8 builds the reported-to-eligible NAV bridge; chapter 9 computes every ratio without it. Two points at every state — and what a subscription line does to the IRR.
The Growth Equity InvestorWhat a pro rata cheque really costs, and the band where defending your ownership loses money.
The Private Credit InvestorThe two coverage ratios are not measured on the same thing: the erosion is 47.7 per cent, not the 28.7 the headline implies.
The Private Equity Fund Controller PlaybookThe book defines IRR, DPI, RVPI and TVPI, tells you to update them at the exit, and prints not one value. Computed: a 1.833× deal inside a fund at 0.892 TVPI.
The Venture Capital AssociateWhat defending a position costs, and how many companies a reserve pool actually defends.
Real Estate FinanceFour people look at one building and reach four numbers; the lender is whole only above 105,109,489, twelve per cent below today’s value rather than forty.
Financial Risk ManagementA fund inside every limit that cannot meet a redemption — and the number that decides it is the one with no currency attached.
Business ValuationThree advisers land 26.8 per cent apart on one company, and the whole gap turns out to be 1.96 points of perpetual growth.
Quantitative FinanceThree models agree to a quarter of one per cent about a number that one unobservable input moves a hundred and three times as much.
Asset ManagementFour people quote four returns for one mandate, all correct and 2.7017 points apart — forty-eight times the manager’s net skill.
Alternative InvestmentsA manager reports 13.29 per cent and the endowment earns 6.26 — both correct, and only a third of the advertised advantage arrives.
Credit AnalysisFour defensible EBITDAs on one borrower give leverage from 3.19x to 6.47x — and the add-back argument is fifty times the covenant headroom.
Venture CapitalOne company out of twenty-eight returns 56.7 per cent of the fund, and half the capital goes in after the decision — at half the return.
Machine Learning for FinanceFive people quote the accuracy of one credit model, all five are right, and the number that decides how much money it makes is none of them.
Commercial Real Estate InvestingThe equity earned 8.6647 per cent and the investor received exactly 8.0000 - the preferred return, and nothing above it.
Mergers and AcquisitionsThe board paper says the deal creates 13,436,667 of value. The arithmetic says it destroys 17,530,855. Nobody is lying.
DerivativesThe treasury report says the hedge cost 1,233,698. That is the interest differential, not a cost. The number that mattered appears in no report at all.
Treasury ManagementFive cash balances for one company, all correct and 145,600,000 apart — and the revolver that is two-thirds of the liquidity leaves at a revenue fall of 8.4127 per cent.
Financial Planning and AnalysisRevenue 3.0190 per cent above budget and operating profit 16.3209 per cent below it, in the same quarter, with every figure correctly stated.
Energy TradingA position report that is 91.7031 per cent hedged and correctly computed, on a book that is short 2,542,000 MWh — and a margin call of 198,400,000 the next morning.
Construction Cost ControlA contract sum of 26,301,102 became a final account of 29,153,363 on the building that was drawn — and 85.8 per cent of what was lost was knowable on the day it was signed.
Trade FinanceSix routes to payment on one 4,200,000 export order cost between 178,040 and 223,268, a spread worth 14.8 per cent of the margin, and a day of buyer credit costs 1,031.76.
Cost AccountingOne factory costed twice on the same 13,440,000 of overhead, and 4,053,091 moves between four product families.
Pricing StrategyA list price of 148.00, a pocket price of 112.51, and the nine deductions in between — with what one point of price is actually worth.
Contract ManagementA bid 5.50 a unit cheaper, signed on paper worth 9.81 a unit more — and 94.68 per cent of it was knowable on the day of signature.
Capital MarketsFour defensible readings of one bond, the cost of an issue under each convention, and the placement discount computed at a constant discount.
Financial RegulationThree ratios pass and the fourth is in breach by 1,956.0 million: the output floor, the liquidity buffer after encumbrance, and the loan split.
Bank ManagementFour defensible readings of one balance sheet, the deposit beta measured two ways, and the liquidity that lasts 3.9 days.
The Real Estate WorkoutFour ways out of one broken loan, discounted to today, and the 58.7 cents at which a payoff beats enforcement.
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