Case Analysis: Harvard Graduate Student Housing Survey

Case Analysis: Harvard Graduate Student Housing Survey

Harvard University owns large amounts of undeveloped property in Allston, across the Charles River from Cambridge and the majority of the Harvard Campus. The objective of the Allston Initiative is to increase the volume of students that rent these properties from Harvard, as opposed to private homes, by 40% among graduate students.

A survey must be created to generate pertinent information in 2005. A similar questionnaire from 2001 would be a valuable starting point for creating a new survey.

The Harvard Real Estate Services (HRES) team was tasked with designing a survey that will provide them with information regarding how best to design these properties to appeal to Harvard students and compete with private options.

Specifically, the survey was designed to find out whether cost, space, and location are the most important variables for current and prospective students, designating which was the most important variable as well as the weight of importance for each variable. The research was designed to be descriptive, in that its focus is learning market characteristics of students – their interests, behaviors, and perceptions.

The initial impression from the 2001 survey is that is seemed very long for what was advertised as a 20-minute questionnaire. The flow of the survey makes sense – it starts broadly asking about housing and progressively becomes more personal and specific. However, it almost seems too detailed, like they were afraid of missing out on valuable information. Some of the options get into more specific information than they could possibly use, and there is quite a bit of redundancy and questions that contain information that is either irrelevant or could simply be inferred. Some of the specific questions that seemed extraneous were those inquiring about amenities.

The scales are a little confusing, omitting