The Harvard Graduate Student Housing Survey

The problem faced by Harvard executives at Harvard Real Estate Services was how to achieve the business objective of increasing the volume of graduate students who rent Harvard houses over private homes by 40%. The Harvard Real Estate Services (HRES) team wanted to know how their development of new student housing property that is at the designing stage, better appeal to Harvard students, and help attain the goal of obtaining their residency. For this purpose a marketing research was conducted with the objective made more specific to which characteristics are the most important in obtaining students to choose residency from Harvard rather than private housing, so as to decide how to design the housing, which attributes students care about most, and if designing the housing in some specific ways would better guarantee that students would choose to live in the Harvard student housing over private housing. From a prior 2001 survey it was seen that cost, space, and location were the 3 most important attributes to students. So the new survey was framed to get information about whether these three factors are still the most important for the students’ housing decision and their respective weights, does the housing affect the choice of school, and to what extent are cost, space, and location of housing actually considered by students in their research and decision making to make a choice among schools to attend. As the marketing research objectives and topics of this survey were attempting to learn market characteristics like interest, desires, perceptions, behaviours of the target audience i.e. students, the research design was descriptive.
The HRES team had several options as to which survey method to use to carry out the research -telephone interviewing, personal interviewing, mail interviewing, or electronic interviewing. Cost and familiarity, greater chances of reaching to students, made HRES go with electronic interviewing.
Secondary research like past research