CHICAGO– Harrison Street, one of the leading investment management firms exclusively focused on alternative real assets, today announced the final close of the firm’s eighth U.S. opportunistic real estate fund, Harrison Street Real Estate Partners VIII, L.P. (“Fund VIII” or the “Fund”) at the Fund’s hard cap of $2.0 billion, exceeding its $1.5 billion target. Harrison Street raised an additional $510 million in co-investment vehicles to invest alongside Fund VIII for a total of $2.5 billion of equity raised and total buying capacity of over $8.0 billion. The Fund received significant support from current Harrison Street investors, making up 75% of the commitments, and welcomed new institutional investors from around the globe.
Fund VIII builds on Harrison Street’s opportunistic fund series, which seeks to capitalize on demographic-driven investment opportunities critical to all age groups and generate value through acquisition, development, and repositioning of assets in partnership with experienced operating partners. Fund VIII has investments across student housing, senior housing, healthcare delivery, medical office, life sciences and storage real estate as well as digital realty and build-to-rent single family housing. Harrison Street is currently the largest private owner of student housing, a top 5 owner of senior housing and a market leader in other sectors such as medical office and life sciences. To date, Fund VIII has committed 53% of its total equity across 76 assets, 28 MSAs and in partnership with 29 best-in-class operators.
Christopher Merrill, Harrison Street’s Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, “For more than 16 years, Harrison Street has provided global institutional investors and partners with scale, certainty of execution, a differentiated investment approach, expertise across our core sectors and an unwavering commitment to innovation. The closing of Fund VIII, the largest closed-end fund in our firm’s history, amid a black swan event, is a testament to the resiliency of our asset classes, the strength of our investment platform, and confidence placed in us by our global investors, both existing and new. We are grateful for our investors’ strong support as we continue to execute on the significant opportunities in front of us and pursue consistent performance across the portfolio throughout market cycles.”
Rob Cook, a Senior Managing Director at Harrison Street and Portfolio Manager for Fund VIII, said, “As a leader and first mover in the alternative real asset space, Harrison Street continues to have excellent access to attractive opportunities across our primary sectors and geographies. As the firm has grown, our Opportunity Fund series remains an important flagship strategy to the firm and we look forward to capitalizing on our deep expertise and relationships and leveraging our world-class team and investment platform to construct a diversified portfolio.”
Merrill added, “Additionally, the first half of 2021 was one of the most active periods in the firm’s history, which highlights our position as a partner of choice for leading healthcare systems and universities and our ability to execute complex transactions in any environment. Harrison Street is committed to delivering strategic capital and partnering with leading operators that give our residents, tenants and partners access to high-quality facilities. We look forward to continuing to generate differentiated investment solutions and endeavor to achieve superior performance for our global investors across our established opportunistic strategies, core and social infrastructure strategies and through exciting new initiatives into Canada, clean energy and digital real assets.”
Harrison Street has closed on $15 billion in new investment activity and received strong support from its investor base with $6.9 billion of capital commitments raised across its strategies since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over a similar timeframe, Harrison Street has continued to expand, adding nearly 46 new positions to their platform, new offices in Toronto and San Francisco, and launching its ESG Investor Council and Harrison Street’s Network of Women dedicated to advancing ESG and DEI initiatives.
Since launching its North American opportunistic real estate fund series in 2006, Harrison Street has invested in approximately 108,000 student housing beds, 27,000 senior housing units, 8.7 million square feet of medical office space, 1.4 million square feet of life sciences, over 115,000 storage units, 500,000 square feet of data centers and 1,675 units of single-family housing.
