Student Housing Leaders Look to AI to Reduce Administrative Work

University housing administration has been slower to adopt artificial intelligence tools than other higher education operations, but according to a new survey from housing platform StarRez, housing leaders are increasingly looking to AI to reduce administrative burden.

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The 2026 State of the Student Housing Industry Report, based on responses from StarRez users at 363 institutions across the U.S., found that 20 percent of respondents are using AI or automation in specific housing processes, and 57 percent are either exploring, piloting or interested in AI. But just 3 percent are using AI across multiple housing processes.

“Everybody’s saying, ‘Help us figure out how,’” StarRez CEO Jason Day said.

Day said adoption remains relatively low, but interest is growing as institutions look for ways to maximize limited resources. The survey found that 46 percent of institutions operate with 10 or fewer professional staff.

Even at schools with a larger staff base, AI can free up time, according to Peter Trentacoste, executive director of residential life at Louisiana State University (LSU). Trentacoste, who oversees hundreds of full-time staff and student employees, and more than 8,000 beds, said he still doesn’t have enough computer staff to handle certain aspects of housing.

“We often don’t have enough folks to respond to messages or to work on documentation,” he said.

Trentacoste said LSU’s approach to bringing AI into student housing operations is to offer access to tools, namely an AI assistant called Glean, without mandating its use.

One staff member, after seeing that a form that all students had completed was missing a helpful data point, used AI to combine the Excel spreadsheet of student responses with another data source. For thousands of student entries, the staff member estimated the AI tool saved him hours of work, Trentacoste said.

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Trentacoste himself has used AI to create a forecast of a building’s costs for the next 30 years, which he said required minimal correction. He has also incorporated AI into his internal communications workflows. For example, if he spends a morning in meetings and misses a lengthy email thread on a housing issue, he will use AI to summarize the thread and get up to speed quickly.

The StarRez survey found similar interests across institutions. Sixty-five percent of respondents said the most valuable area AI could support is reducing manual administrative work. Among potential use cases, the most popular were content creation (69 percent), resident communications (42 percent), data analysis or reporting (38 percent) and operational efficiency (35 percent).

Day said those use cases reflect the volume of repetitive work involved in running a housing operation.

“There are certain aspects of [move-in] that are just saying, ‘Yes, they came in,’ and, ‘Yes they have a key,’” Day said. “Those are the mundane tasks that have to be accomplished in the back office, and if there are ways that we can help to automate that through AI, that allows the institution or the staff to get back to why they got into higher education and student housing to begin with: the students.”

Expanding AI integration comes with concerns. Privacy and compliance were the top barrier to AI adoption in the survey, cited by 44 percent of respondents. Another 34 percent cited cultural resistance and lack of trust.

“Discernment, judgment, empathy, relationship building — those are all uniquely human things that we need to maintain,” Trentacoste said.