The four apartment complexes West Virginia University operates as an option for students to live on campus after leaving the dorms appear on track for a noticeably empty year.
As of May 13, only one apartment of four has more than half of its available beds pre-leased for next year, documents show. College Park is 75 percent pre-leased, while the other three are still waiting more than half empty.
Landlords in the area say students not signing leases for WVU apartments is just one glimpse into an over-saturated housing market they don't think will get any better any time soon.
"It's kind of like high school soccer players," said Frank Scafella, executive director of Campus Neighborhoods Revitalization Corporation, better known as Sunnyside Up. "They kick the ball and everybody runs to it to get into that market. And then it's overdone, it's over-built and everybody suffers."
Three WVU apartments have all opened within three years and investors not associated with WVU are still running toward that soccer ball.
Developers from Georgia want to build an 866-bed complex called The Standard downtown at the corner of University Avenue and Walnut street, although development has been mired with controversy, WAJR reports.
"I think the other thing we're seeing in this market - and we're still trying to get a better handle on it - is because there are so many options in the market, we think many kids are postponing their decisions about where to live," said Narvel Weese, vice president of administration and finance at WVU.
Nathan Barkley has worked with student housing since 2003 at local apartment complexes on the outskirts of Morgantown. Now he works for WVU's real estate office as its interim assistant director.
Barkley says students start signing leases as early as September for the next school year, but most students sign leases by January - seven months before classes start.
In April, one of WVU's apartments, University Place, promoted a special deal on Twitter to lock in rates for three years if students signed leases by a certain time. Barkley said WVU typically discourages students, especially freshmen, from signing a lease before the end of the fall semester, but he won't turn any freshman away who tries to sign one for a WVU apartment.
"If they want to sign, we'll accept the lease from them," Barkley said. "We do let them know that it's a binding lease," regardless of whether or not students come back for a second year.
Dave Kelly, owner of Kelly Rental Management, said there is strong animosity among local landlords toward WVU because they feel WVU over-saturated the market. Kelly says the market needs more students. But with slight decreases in enrollment since 2012, he isn't hopeful.
There was a need for more student housing close to WVU's downtown campus, Scafella said, but that's not the case anymore. Too many new apartment complexes were built downtown and there's still roughly the same number of students.
Scafella spends his days thinking about how he can revitalize the infrastructure in Sunnyside, an area adjacent to WVU that is home to many students who live off campus and, until recent years, ground zero for house parties and couch burnings.
WVU hailed University Place as one answer to that when it was constructed.
The more than 900-bed apartment complex is only 36 percent pre-leased.
Scafella's organization, in a market analysis from April 2015, looked at ways it can balance the housing market in the Sunnyside area so there are more residences where the owners live in the home, rather than all-student rentals as was the case in decades past.
Instead, there are two large apartment complexes on one side of the neighborhood: University Place and American Campus Communities' U-Club Sunnyside, which has 536 beds.
Save for Vandalia Apartments, WVU apartments were built thanks to public-private partnerships. WVU's board of governors approved a student housing master plan in 2012, which says that revenues generated from those partnerships should be for deferred maintenance in the school's aging dorms.
Weese said WVU is in the process of completing a new master plan for housing.
Scafella looks at the occupancy rates for WVU-owned apartments and sees what he already knows to be true: Students don't want big-box apartments. They want homes with porches to sit on with their friends; they want to live in an area that feels like a neighborhood.
Weese said there is some good news: "There's lots of options. That's one thing we wanted to happen with the Sunnyside development when we built University Place."
Some of the options don't come cheap. A two-bedroom "deluxe apartment" at University Place rents for $835 a month, a one-bedroom apartment at University Park goes for $1,250 a month and each person in a four-bedroom apartment at University park has to pay $781 a month.
"It's better than what was there, but here's the thing," Kelly said. "Yes, I think it looks better and it probably functions better and it's probably higher quality. But who cares [about all of that], if the kids can't afford it? It's like a car shop. If you go out and only offer Cadillacs, what are the people who can only afford cheap cars going to do?"
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-7939 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.