Rental Connections
Rental Connections is our quarterly landlord newsletter. We want you to stay connected to your student market!
If you are a landlord and would like to receive e-mail notification when Rental Connections is published, or you would like to make content suggestions please e-mail our Communications & Marketing Coordinator at Michelle.Rangel@colorado.edu.
A Guide for New Renters
Off-Campus Housing & Neighborhood Relations has re-designed its student tenant guide, Good House Renting. Finding housing and signing a lease for the first time can be an overwhelming experience. That is why Off-Campus Housing created a comprehensive guide to living and renting in Boulder. The guide was developed to help alleviate the stress of locating available rentals, and to educate students on their new responsibilities as tenants and Boulder community members. Students have access to Good House Renting through their residence hall lobby or online.
The guide encourages students to consider all their options before deciding to move off-campus. Good Housing Renting provides a map and descriptions of Boulder neighborhoods, as well as information on on-campus housing, including Bear Creek and Graduate & Family Housing.
Ralphie’s List and the Housing Fairs are promoted as helpful university resources for finding student rentals. The guide also provides tips for finding pet friendly units and how to avoid scams on Craig’s List.
Other topics include budgeting, how to save on energy bills, how to find roommates (and the importance of roommate agreements), the move-in process and renters insurance.
New renters are often unfamiliar with Boulder laws and ordinances. The guide addresses over occupancy, joint and several liability, and several Boulder ordinances, including trash and noise.
This guide was designed to help students start their search. Our move-in guide, Your Move-In, is a separate publication that outlines tenant responsibilities following move-in. Please encourage your current, and potential tenants, to read our publications for helpful renting advice.
Housing Fair Survey
If your company attended the Off-Campus Housing Fair on January 30th, Off-Campus Housing would appreciate your feedback. We would be grateful if you would complete our 12 question survey regarding the Housing Fair and fall pre-leasing. Your feedback will be used to help us improve the quality of our programming for future years. Thank you for your time. TAKE SURVEY
Spring Move-Out
Off-Campus Housing and the CU Environmental Center have partnered together for the past three years to provide off-campus students helpful information for their move-out process, including a list of donation centers and information on Boulder’s trash ordinances.
During the week of finals, over a thousand flyers are distributed by students ambassadors to rental houses in Goss Grove and University Hill. The flyer encourages students to dispose of their used belongings in an appropriate manner, and provides a list of local donation and recycling centers. The goal is to raise awareness of recycling and the impact of trash in the community.
Please encourage your tenants to dispose of their belongings appropriately and remind them that they can receive a ticket for placing their trash in someone else’s dumpster and allowing their trash to accumulate.
We welcome you to download and provide your tenants with our list of donation centers. We are also open to suggestions, as we may have missed a popular resource in Boulder.
Spring Reminders
- If your tenant intends to sublet his/her unit, encourage him/her to post the vacancy on Ralphie's List. Students can post a sublease ad and create a roommate profile if others will be staying in the unit.
- Off-Campus Housing provides students and landlords sublease agreements. Individuals can download the form or pick up a hard copy in the office.
- Remind your tenants to lock their doors and windows, turn porch lights on at night, and keep their belongings away from windows. If their place is ever burglarized, it is important that they call the police department and file a report.
- Students can register their graduation parties if they are on a Friday or Saturday, after 5:00pm. (We no longer registered parties with amplified outdoor music.)
Graduation will be held at 8:30am on Friday, May 10th at Folsom Stadium.
Notes from the Chancellor’s Town Hall on April 18:
- According to the U.S. News and World Report graduate program rankings, six CU graduate programs are rated in the Top 10. This includes the atomic, molecular and optical physics program, tied at No. 1 with MIT.
- In the United States there are more than 2,700 four-year and graduate not-for-profit colleges and universities. Approximately 250 of those are considered to be highly research active. From this cohort, over half of our nation's university research productivity comes from only 25 universities. And CU is No. 22.
- A 2010 study in the journal, Science, showed 19 American universities generate about half of U.S. research citations. CU-Boulder is No. 8 on that list.
- MAVEN--the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission—is NASA’s first mission to study Mars’ upper atmosphere. CU will be providing the science operations, the space instruments and the public education outreach for the mission. MAVEN has created multiple jobs across the country in the aerospace industry and has added to the research prowess of the United States.
- CU has contracted with Coursera and will begin offering four MOOCs (massive open online courses) this fall. Coursera allows top-tier universities to make select courses available--for free-- to hundreds of thousands of students worldwide. More than 22,500 people have already enrolled.
- The Board of Regents has approved an 8.7 percent tuition increase for the Boulder campus.
- CU is offering a new merit scholarship for high-achieving resident students called the Esteemed Scholars Program. The scholarships are at three levels and award top Colorado students up to $20,000 over 4 years, based on high-school GPA and test scores.
- This spring’s graduating class includes: 11 Boettcher Scholars, 19 Norlin Scholars, 2 Goldwater Scholars, and 11 graduates in the President’s Leadership Class (2 are going into Teach for America, 7 are headed to graduate programs and 2 are going to medical school).
Read the Chancellor's speech in its entirety.
