Configure a Housing Lottery Selection

Housing lotteries allow you to assign room selection times to students based on specific criteria, using the power of tags. For example, if you want students to pick their housing based on their school year, you can easily create multiple phases that automatically assign selection times to freshmen, sophomores, etc. By tagging students, you can streamline the process and ensure appointments are assigned fairly and consistently.

This guide will walk you through the processes of setting up a housing lottery, assigning appointment times, and notifying students.

Creating A Housing Lottery Room Selection Phase

Navigate to Housing Cycles under the Setup section of the admin portal.

Click the name of the cycle you'd like to configure for the housing lottery. Click here for more on creating a new housing cycle.

Click Phases to review and manage the different stages of your housing cycle.

Click Edit to review and add to your housing cycle phases.

Under Room Selection, click Add Phase to create a housing lottery-style selection phase.

Add the required details to your selection phase. Ensure you select Lottery Style to activate the lottery system features. Click 📄 Configure an All At Once Room Selectionfor managing all at once room selections.

Name: Enter the internal name for this phase.	Start and End Time: The time period during which selection appointments will be generated to occur in.
Begin and End Date: Define the period during which room selection appointments will occur.	Bucket Duration: The length of time a student has to access to select a room.
Room Selection Style: Choose Lottery Style to randomly assign appointment times or set specific criteria.	Wait Time Between Buckets: Define the time interval between appointment slots to allow inventory management between selections.
Randomized Timeslots: Assigns timeslots randomly to all eligible applicants.	Limit to tags: Only students who match every selected tag will be included in the phase.
Earliest Application Submission: Assigns timeslots based on the date of completed application submissions (pending applications are excluded).	Exclude from tag: Students matching the selected tags will be disqualified from this phase, even if they match the limit to tags.

After adding your room selection phase details, click Save. Your phase is now added to your housing cycle and ready to have applicants assigned.

Generate Housing Lottery Assignment Periods

Click Room Selection Lottery in the admin portal to manage assignment periods.

Click Generate Random Assignment Periods to automatically assign selection timeslots to students who meet the phase criteria.

After generating timeslots, you can continue to re-generate them if new students have completed applications and meet your phase criteria.

Notes:

Students who have submitted applications are eligible to be assigned a housing lottery selection time. Students with pending applications will not be considered.

Housing lottery selection times are generated on an individual basis. This means that any student meeting the criteria of the selection phase will receive their own unique appointment time.

For students in a roommate group during the selection period, you can configure whether the group will utilize the earliest or latest appointment assigned within that group.

If a student joins or leaves a group after the selection times have been assigned, they will retain their original appointment. No further action is required, as the time is permanently associated with the student, regardless of their group status.

Manually Add Students to the Phase

Click the + button to open student search options.

Select a student and specify their appointment time. Click + Add Student to finalize.

Notify Students of Their Selection Time

Once appointment times are assigned, click the mail icon to notify students of their selection date and time via email and resident portal notification.

Note: If any adjustments are made to assignment times or you re-generate the assignment periods, you will need to re-notify students of their new time by clicking the mail icon.