Harrison Street has raised $2.5bn (€2.15bn) for its eigthth US opportunistic real estate fund, it’s largest-ever closed-ended fund.
Harrison Street Real Estate Partners VIII reached its $2bn ‘hard cap’ and secured an additional $510m in co-investment capital, giving it buying capacity of more than $8bn. The company said 75% of the commitments came from existing investors.
It is the latest in the company’s series of funds that focus on “demographic-driven investment opportunities” in the US, including student housing, senior housing, healthcare delivery, medical offices, life-science and storage real estate.
Since launching its fund in 2006, Harrison Street said it had invested in approximately 108,000 student housing beds, 27,000 senior housing units, 8.7m sqft of medical office space, 1.4m sqft of life sciences, over 115,000 storage units, 500,000sqft of data centres, and 1,675 units of single-family housing.
Christopher Merrill, Harrison Street’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, said the company’s ability to raise its largest-ever fund “amid a black-swan event” was ”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”.
He said the first half of 2021 was one of the most active periods in the firm’s history.