While foreclosure signs are popping up across the rest of the country, the I-beams and cranes of high-rise developments are sprouting up around campus.

These lofts, condos and apartments will be more resort than residence hall. At a price tag of about $1,000 per month per bedroom, marbled granite countertops, ten-foot ceilings, sleek modern furniture, private baths and flat-screen LCD televisions are standard. Not to mention the tanning beds, movie screening rooms, pool tables, gyms, green roofs, state-of-the-art security systems and badminton courts that developers have included to further entice students into paying more for extra amenities.

For decades, both the near-campus housing market of converted colonials and the on-campus market have remained relatively stagnant. But in the last several years, the city has warmed to high-density development. This, combined with what analysts say is an unmet demand for new student housing, is fueling a veritable construction boom.

Next fall, a new wave of luxury apartments will open, adding more than 2,000 beds to the near-campus housing market. And this is just in the next year alone, at the least, the total will increase by an additional 1,500 beds, spread across three different developments in the next two to three years after that.

This may not seem like much at first, but with an estimated 34,000 students living off- or near-campus, this surge of new construction represents nearly a 10-percent increase in available housing.

Although the jury is still out about whether the developers behind projects like 4 Eleven Lofts, Zaragon Place, 601 Forest, The Courtyards and 42 North, will find the demand they are banking for, the situation seems to be a win-win for students.

WHY HERE? WHY NOW?

A constant stream of affluent students willing to shell out for creature comforts and the lack of new construction in recent years has made campus a ripe market for developers.

“It’s obvious,” said Rick Pearlman, president of Zaragon Incorporated, the company that is building Zaragon Place on East University Avenue. “When you go around you see that most of (the student housing) is very old, very tried.”

Allen, who is an adjunct real estate lecturer in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Ross School of Business, said he was confident that first wave of luxury complexes close to campus — like Zaragon Place and 4 Eleven lofts — will be popular with students.

“The developers of these two developments know the campus. And they think they know the student values. So it was not a big leap of feasibility to think Zaragon and 4 Eleven Lofts would work here,” Allen said of the Chicago-based developers Zaragon Incorporated and Joseph Freed and Associates, who are building Zaragon Place and 4 Eleven Lofts, respectively.

One reason developers may have picked this as the time to build, Allen said, is that the residential rental market is not as sensitive as other real estate markets to the current financial crisis.

“Residential rental is the only niche market today to be able to get financing,” he said.

In recent years, city officials have also grown friendlier to developers. In 2006, Ann Arbor City Council passed the Ann Arbor Discovering Downtown Initiative, which placed a priority on high-density development in the city’s urban core.

WILL STUDENTS PAY?

As developers bank on the perceived reliability of students’ demand for high-class living, some traditional landlords and residents worry that even Ann Arbor, with its constant stream of renters, can support such a sudden surge of new development.

A one-bedroom apartment in 4 Eleven Lofts, which will open in May, begins at $1,295 a month while per-person rent for a four-bedroom starts at $835 a month. At Zaragon Place, which will also open in May, a four-bedroom suite is $4,000 a month.

The Courtyards, a more suburban-style complex on North Campus that opened its first building this fall, will rent a one-bedroom apartment for $1,149 a month, and charge $649 per person for a four-bedroom, four-bath suite next fall.

These rates are well above what the average student pays. In 2007, the average rate for a one-bedroom apartment was $776 and the average total rate for a four-bedroom unit was $2,085 ($521 per person), according to the Off-Campus Rental Rate report complied from rates advertised on University Housing’s off-campus housing website.

Though fluctuating from year to year and varying depending on the month of the survey, near-campus housing rates have stayed relatively flat over the past 10 years.