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CREATIVE DIRECTION | BRAND MARKETING AND STRATEGY
From 2.3 Stars to Full Capacity
Rebuilding reputation and community at a Kitchener student residence
What I did: Rebuilt the reputation, community, and resident communication system for Collegeview Commons as Creative Director, in-house first through DMS Property Management, then through Campus Living Centres.
Outcome: Took the property's Google rating from 2.3 to 4.6 and reached full occupancy for the first time in its history, with the mandate carried across a change in building management at the owner's direction.
Scope: Event programming, campaign identity, weekly newsletter and memo design, poster systems, resident feedback collection, leasing and referral creative.
CONTEXT
Collegeview Commons is student housing in Kitchener, a short drive from Conestoga College, with a resident base that includes a significant number of international students. Student housing runs on a fixed annual clock. The September leasing season decides the year, and inside a small, connected student population, word of mouth moves faster than any paid campaign can counter it.
I was brought in in June 2023 by DMS Property Management, the company overseeing the building at the time, with a direct brief: fix a reputation that had collapsed and build a community that didn't yet exist. The property was running below half capacity. Its Google rating sat at 2.3.
That September, Starlight Investments, the building's owner, moved management of the property from DMS to Campus Living Centres. At Starlight's direction, I was retained to continue the mandate without interrupting the work already underway. I started with Campus Living Centres that October, carrying the same brief forward under a new employer.
PROBLEM
The instinct here is to treat a low rating as a reputation problem and fix it with a review campaign. That would have been the wrong read. A 2.3 rating and a half-empty building weren't a visibility problem, they were an accurate reflection of a resident experience nobody had reason to talk about positively. No amount of marketing spend improves a rating when the thing being rated hasn't changed.
The real problem was structural. Residents had no consistent reason to engage with the building. Management had no consistent channel to reach them. The leasing funnel had nothing to point to except unit specs. Reputation, community, and leasing were being run as three separate problems when they were one system.
ROLE
I led creative and strategic direction across the full engagement, from June 2023 through the DMS-to-Campus Living Centres handoff, through the completion of the core turnaround in September 2025, to the wind-down of my role in January 2026. I worked alongside the building manager on day-to-day operations and the head-office marketing team on budget and brand alignment. The engagement strategy, the recurring programming model, the campaign identities, and the weekly resident communication system were mine.
APPROACH
The first move was building events as infrastructure, not marketing moments. A single one-off giveaway doesn't shift a rating, it produces a spike and fades. I built a recurring weekly calendar instead, Theater Thursdays, TGIF game nights, Fitness Saturdays, karaoke, ice-cream Sundays, seasonal activations, so residents had something to expect and build into their routine rather than something to be told about after the fact.
The second move was making reputation recovery an outcome of the resident experience, not a request. During events, I spoke directly with residents, collected feedback, brought recurring issues back to management, and invited attendees to share honest reviews of the building. Reviews were never treated as a substitute for improving the experience itself.
The third move was building a weekly operating rhythm that made the building feel consistently active. Every Monday ran the same five-step loop: research what mattered that week, align it with management on priority messages, write and design the newsletter and supporting memos, distribute it to residents by email, and refresh the A4 posters mounted in the lobby, between the elevators, and at the gym and lobby entrances, so the physical building matched what residents had just been sent digitally.
The last move extended the same infrastructure into acquisition. Leasing and referral campaigns used the same visual language and proof points residents already knew, so a prospective tenant touring the building saw the same story a current resident was living.
OUTCOME
Collegeview Commons' Google rating rose from approximately 2.3 to 4.6 by the time the core turnaround was complete in September 2025. The property reached full occupancy for the first time in its history within that window. Resident reviews began naming the programming and the team directly, including staff by name.
The core turnaround mandate was complete by September 2025. I remained through January 2026 to support the final intake cycle and transition the programming and communication rhythm I had established.
