Student Housing · PBSA
Purpose-built for purpose-built student accommodation
Atrium was forged in PBSA: by-the-bed leasing, academic-year intakes, NSFAS and bursary funding, guarantor journeys and a student app that digital natives expect.
The grind today
Sound familiar?
Demand arrives in waves
Thousands of applications land in weeks around the academic year; allocation and lease-up have to keep pace or beds start the year empty.
NSFAS and mixed funding
State funders pay directly, with caps; the balance splits across bursaries, parents and students - and reconciliation is brutal by hand.
Every bed is a lease
Shared units let by the bed multiply the admin: bed-level pricing, allocations, ledgers and turnover every single year.
With Atrium
How Atrium changes it
Bed-level everything
Leases, pricing and ledgers attach to the bed inside the shared unit - the data model PBSA actually needs.
Portfolio & Occupancy
Intake-scale admissions
Online applications, vetting, bulk allocation and e-sign leases with built-in guarantor consent - tuned for academic-calendar surges.
Leasing & Applications
NSFAS-native billing
Capped-funder billing with automatic shortfall splits, remittance import and reconciliation - NSFAS, bursaries and private payers on one invoice run.
Billing & Collections
A student app that lands
Rent, maintenance, announcements and res-life events on their phone - table stakes for a digital-native resident base.
Resident Experience
The outcome
What good looks like
The measurable state Atrium is built to get operators to - anchored on real milestones, not feature checklists.
Next intake leased and collected end-to-end on one platform
Live occupancy by residence and academic year
NSFAS remittances reconciled in hours, not weeks
Guarantors signed digitally, bound to the lease record
Annual re-leasing handled with bulk renewals and waitlists
Features
Key features
Hover over or tap any feature for a short explanation.
Admissions
- Lease-up windows tied to the academic calendar, with occupancy and vacancy tracked per residence per intake.
- Applications verify proof of registration and NSFAS status, so funded students go straight to the right billing path.
- Beds in shared units let individually, with roommates managed and waitlists auto-offering beds as they free up.
- Parents or guardians are invited to consent and co-sign the lease and surety digitally.
- House a university's cohort of students under an institutional agreement.
Funding and billing
- NSFAS is billed as an institutional payer, with the accommodation cap applied and only the shortfall billed to the student.
- Import NSFAS disbursements and reconcile them against what was expected, so mismatches surface early.
- Bursary and university-funded students billed to the funder, with the same cap and shortfall handling.
- Prices set per bed, room type and residence, so each room is priced to demand.
- Guarantors are told about arrears and can pay online before they escalate.
Residence life
- Access, inspection and induction completed in the app, so move-in day is quick and paperless.
- Rent, maintenance, events and a pre-funded wallet for laundry, the cafe and printing, paid by scanning a code.
- Students raise safety or incident reports and reach emergency contacts from the app.
- The yearly renewal cycle runs from one place, with churned beds put back on the market for the next intake.
- Exit inspections and deposit refunds or deductions handled in one flow, returning the bed to the pool.
A typical student housing plan
FAQ
Student Housing · PBSA - common questions
Natively. Capped-funder billing, automatic shortfall splits and bulk remittance reconciliation are core platform capabilities, with NSFAS shipped as a preset in the Student Housing pack.
See Atrium run student housing · pbsa
A 30-minute walkthrough with your own scenarios - beds, funders, intakes and all.