Harrison Street on Tuesday 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), at the fund’s hard cap of $2 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 billion.
Harrison Street said Fund VIII 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.
”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,” said Christopher Merrill, Harrison Street’s Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.
“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,” Merill added.
