The Optimal Functional Mixture for Student Housing Initiatives: An Italian Case Study

Student housing is one of the main alternative asset classes within the real estate sector. In Italy, this sector is experiencing rapid growth and presents an excellent opportunity for attractive returns. However, the gap between the demand and supply of student accommodations remains substantial, therefore, the spread of student housing initiatives is supported by National Recovery and Resilience Plan dispositions that foster its application. The aim of the work is to define a goal-programming based model able to maximize the profit of the private subject involved into the initiatives that concern the enhancement of student housing accommodations. It concerns the definition of a management model that provides for the possibility of allocating part of the rooms to tourist hospitality. Starting from these considerations, in this paper an operations research problem whose objective is to identify the optimal mix of functions that allows the maximization of the profit of the structure manager is proposed. The obtained results show interesting margin of profit in the case for which the integration with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan are considered.