Harrison Street Asset Management CEO Christopher Merrill Owns the Alternatives Space

Harrison Street Asset Management CEO Christopher Merrill Owns the Alternatives Space Merrill turned a hunch about demographic-focused investment 20 years ago into a $109 billion juggernaut By Brian Pascus June 29, 2026 6:30 am reprintsChristopher Merrill is the co-founder and CEO of Harrison Street Asset Management, a global investment firm in real estate alternative assets. Founded just over 20 years ago in Chicago with seed capital from the Galvin family (of Motorola fame), Merrill raised a $209 million investment fund during the Global Financial Crisis, convinced that student housing, senior housing, medical office and self-storage would perform no matter the state of the economy. Today, Harrison Street Asset Management oversees $109 billion in assets under management across real estate, infrastructure and private credit. Headquartered in Chicago, Toronto and London, the firm also has offices and footholds for its 600 employees across New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. Colliers International purchased a 75 percent stake in Merrill’s business in 2018 for $550 million, and now uses Harrison Street as its main investment management arm. Working hand in glove with Colliers leadership, Merrill has gone on an acquisitions spree himself, and doubled Harrison Street’s AUM from $55 billion in just the last year. Merrill sat down with Commercial Observer to discuss his mentorship under the Galvin family, his early real estate education in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down, why he targeted alternatives before almost anyone else, and his goals for a firm he built from scratch into a true international commercial real estate powerhouse. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Commercial Observer: What are the origins of your career? Christopher Merrill: When I was 18, I began as a summer intern for a Chicago-based real estate investment firm called Heitman, where I worked in several different areas in consecutive summers. One summer was in property management, another was in construction, and one more was in acquisitions. And a week after I graduated college, I began working full time in the acquisitions room of Heitman, and that’s how my real estate career began. What was the big turning point in your career? When I started at Heitman, my job was just as a typical analyst: underwriting commercial buildings. But then I was tapped to work for the chairman of the board on special projects, and that was one of those lucky opportunities that has happened to me because, as a result of that, I was working on some unique things. There was a developer in town we worked with who had begun exploring Central and Eastern Europe. It was a Chicago-based developer who had become one of the first to look at building there after the Berlin Wall had come down. At the time, the firm had never made an overseas investment, but he asked if our firm would be interested in investing overseas. So this developer and I toured Central and Eastern Europe for a few weeks, and when I came back I wrote my “Jerry Maguire memo,” where I outlined this unbelievable opportunity in Central Europe for Heitman. This was the mid-1990s, the Berlin Wall had come down, and now we had 400 million consumers. Every U.S. company wanted to be there, but there was no commercial space to operate out of — everyone in Eastern Europe was operating out of old hotel rooms. I said to my firm, “Would you let me go to Europe and start a business in Central Europe?” And, lucky enough, they gave me a shot to go for it. So I moved to London in 1997 with the idea of building a business around Central European real estate. How did that go for you? I was there for five years, and went over to verify interesting investment opportunities. You could look for a property in Budapest, and it was a 12 percent, 13 percent, 14 percent cap rate. An hour west, in Vienna, it was a 5 percent cap rate. These were markets that were part of NATO, and they had gotten the bug of capitalism and they weren’t going backward, so you were leasing buildings to great companies. But, again, there was not that much liquidity. So it forced me to develop my own capital relationships. And, from that, we launched the first investment fund started in Central Europe in the late 1990s. It just took off from there. We raised a series of funds, grew the business, built a great team, and had great support from Heitman. When these countries joined the European Union, cap rates compressed, and we were able to give a great outcome to our investors. What was the investment climate in Eastern Europe like at the time? When you look back at Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, they were part of NATO and were really smart local economies with educated workforces that embraced the West. You had British, French and American developers, German and Austrian banks, and all these consumer goods companies and the supporting services like law firms and accounting firms that wanted to be there as a beachhead. When you looked at it, it did appear risky because there wasn’t a lot of liquidity. But, at the same time, you got paid to wait, and you knew it was coming. You could feel it. The fundamentals were there, and that’s what was exciting about it. What led to the formation of Harrison Street? I came back to the States in 2001, and this concept of trying to differentiate and create something unique in the investment management space is not easy. And what had happened in Central Europe is people had dabbled in the region, the larger funds might have had a small piece of Central Europe, but there wasn’t a pure-play Central European fund. And that’s really what made our work successful. In the U.S., I was looking for the next idea and, at the time, people were dabbling in demographics, dabbling in education real estate, health care real estate, and self-storage, but there wasn’t a pure-play demographic investor. And so I said, “Boy, why don’t we try and create a business around that theme?” Let’s not necessarily be a macro-investor, but a demand investor. And that’s really how Harrison Street was born. I left Heitman, found a financial backer, and launched Harrison Street in 2005 with the idea of being the first firm that was a pure-play investor around alternative real estate. Who was your financial backer? This was another very lucky situation. Chris Galvin had been the chairman and CEO of Motorola [from 1997 to 2003]. He’s a family friend and just an amazing man, and he’d been a mentor of mine since I was 12 years old. I had always stayed in touch with the Galvin family throughout my career, as they’re a Chicago family, so I went to Chris Galvin with this idea [about investing in alternative demographic-heavy asset classes] and said, “I’m trying to do something different.” That family, obviously, is all about innovation — about doing things unique and different. At the time, Chris was leaving Motorola and setting up a family office. And we started talking about what I would need to develop this business. So Chris and his brother Mike gave me the capital to start the business. We started as a 50-50 partnership. They owned half the business, I owned the other half, and away we went. That’s where the name Harrison Street comes from: Motorola started on Harrison Street in Chicago. How would you describe the composition of the initial Harrison Street portfolio? Today, we’re a $110 billion firm operating in North America and Europe, focused on real estate equity, debt and infrastructure. When we started, the concept was really around education — student housing, off-campus student housing, health care, medical office building, senior housing, self-storage — just asset classes that were needs-based, where demand would be consistent in good and bad times. People need to go to school, go to the doctor, they get old, they use storage, all in good and bad times, but they’re very fragmented asset classes. So, the question was, “Could we build a business around a rifle focus in these asset classes, one investment at a time, create portfolios, and ultimately sell them?” At the time, only 1 percent of the market liquidity was these asset classes. That’s increased to probably 15 percent today. Again, it was very much like Central Europe: You could see the consistent demand for these asset classes, they were fragmented, but there wasn’t a big institutional market. But you looked at the underlying fundamentals and you felt really good about it. Then, we hit the GFC two years into the business, and that really put an interesting spotlight on our thesis because, at that point in time, it was very difficult, but our student and senior housing did better than multifamily. Our medical office did better than traditional office, and our self-storage did better than industrial. So it highlighted the demand for these asset classes in a tough economy, like the GFC. It started to shine a light on the opportunities of these alternative asset classes. How did your fund business grow? We continued to raise our flagship closed funds, but we also recognized there is a very well-defined industry within core real estate called the ODCE funds. Probably 60 percent of institutional real estate is in these core, open-ended real estate funds. And these funds are made up of office, industrial, retail and residential. That’s the ODCE Index. It’s very low-leverage, core exposure. For us, I said, “Well, what if we create the first core fund that’s 100 percent alternatives?” We’d look just like an ODCE fund, same leverage profile, but we’ll do it with all alternative asset classes. The thinking was we just proved that these assets preserve capital in a down market, with lower volatility, and get better income returns, so why would that not be a perfect core investment in real estate? So, we launched it. And, while it was tough at the beginning, 14 years later, it’s probably $15 billion in size and has been one of the best-performing open-ended funds in the industry. How did your infrastructure business develop? Over time, we have become the largest private owner of off-campus student housing, but what also happened was we started to develop relationships with the universities themselves. In the off-campus business, you really don’t have any legal affiliation with the school, but you want to have a positive reputation with the school. And we started talking to the schools, and what became pretty obvious was their need for help concerning their on-campus housing. On-campus housing is typically older, it has a lot of deferred maintenance, these are public universities that don’t have a lot of capital and rely on capital campaigns and the borrowing that sustains them. We developed a public-to-private partnership program that basically goes in and works with universities around campus housing. We set up an infrastructure strategy that is long term, open ended. We tell a school like the University of Chicago or the University of Kentucky that we’ll help fix your on-campus housing for the next 20 to 30 years. Well, what happened was the school said, “Thank you for the help with our housing, but we also have some issues with our power plant, our wastewater, and district energy.” So we said, “Boy, here’s an interesting opportunity for us to be a solutions provider to these schools within all of their hard assets.” So we brought on a team of folks from GE Capital and started building an infrastructure business. This was probably 12, 13 years ago, and that morphed into doing renewable energy, working with municipalities, and that led to working with the military, as we do military housing at Fort Bragg. It was a way for us to basically grow into the infrastructure space, but still focus on these demand-driven asset classes like student housing. And how many schools has Harrison Street worked with? Probably 30 to 40 different schools we work with on campus, and we’ve probably worked with over 200 schools in our off-campus business. Do you enjoy working with schools and helping them find solutions? What’s cool about our business, and very lucky, is when I stand up in front of the employee base, I can ask, “What are we doing?” And the answer is we’re investing capital on behalf of retirees, pension funds, firefighters, police officers, teachers, et cetera. So that’s important. And how are we doing it? Well, we’re doing it in a way that is investing in society’s infrastructure: We’re providing safe accommodations for students or providing great accommodations for seniors, or providing medical offices for research and development. What’s nice about connecting the dots within our business lines is we can make money, but do it in a way where you feel like you’re actually providing what is really needed. We have such a lack of infrastructure in this country — for education, for health care, for digital transmission, all these things — so that’s where we can see this growth. How did your business relationship with Colliers begin? In 2018, I was 45 years old, the firm had grown, and one of the things we wanted to start thinking about was the succession planning of the business. I didn’t want to have a situation where a lot of younger folks walked out the door. So, I went to the Galvin family with a proposal to buy them out and to bring in an institutional balance sheet that would be sort of a perpetuity investor that would allow me to start thinking about moving equity into the next generations and create deeper alignment with the investors. For Colliers, they looked at it and saw that some of their peers, CBRE or JLL, had investment manager arms, and Colliers didn’t really have one. So Colliers liked what we were doing and bought a 75 percent interest in our business [in 2018]. It’s very much hands off, but it’s a partnership where they say, “What can we do to help you? How can you shore up your balance sheet? How can we give you the capital to grow?” They made that investment in us, and that allowed us to create greater alignment with our investor base. It’s been eight years or so, and, as we continue to grow our business organically, there were certain areas that we also wanted to explore. We wanted to provide real estate debt. We wanted to think about some closed-end infrastructure. We wanted to explore the private wealth channels. So, Colliers and myself worked to identify a number of other businesses that could be acquired by Colliers over the past four or five years. After those businesses were acquired, we ultimately rolled these business lines together to form what we now call Harrison Street Asset Management, recognizing that operating together could create better outcomes for all of us. Is that how Harrison Street’s assets jumped from $55 billion to $109 billion in one year? It wasn’t really a jump as much as it was a coming together. There was not a jump. It was that the businesses were in some cases operating independently, in other cases it was Colliers as the main partner. What we said is, “Let’s come together, and in certain parts — like investor solutions, compliance, risk management, transactions — let’s link together because that can be a better outcome for our limited partners.” So that’s really where that AUM number came from. But these are all businesses that had been working together for the previous five years. How have you chosen to enter into the data center space? We’ve invested probably $7 billion or $8 billion into the data center space. We’ve looked at it in part from a real estate perspective. We’ve gotten into what I would call the powered-shell business. If there is an opportunity in a strong market where we can sign a long-term lease to a group like Amazon Web Services or Meta, then, for us, that’s a real estate play. We’re not worried about access to power. We’re not worried about who our long-term user is. We’re not taking the risk of buying land and trying to find power, which is a big risk today. We’re looking at it as almost a net-lease opportunity. So that’s where we play in data center real estate. With our infrastructure lines, we’ve done what we would call “carrier hotels,” which is where the connection takes place in major cities — very monopolistic assets, or, in the dark fiber business, the fiber connecting the data centers. So that’s where we have played. We haven’t really gone into the “Let’s go buy land and hope we find power [i.e. wildcatting].” and we’re not really playing in the AI part of the industry. It’s a very select subset of how we’re playing in data centers. How does senior housing look in the next five to 10 years? It’s one of our high-conviction sectors, and it has been for a while. Every month, 80,000 people turn 80 in this country. One in 10 Americans need senior housing. And, as a country, we’re probably creating only 40 percent of the annual need, so there’s such a shortage right now. As you look at the aging population, our big focus is on independent-living, assisted memory care and private-pay rentals. It’s very hard to take care of a loved one with health and memory issues. It’s very hard to take care of a parent. We’re gonna wake up in five years with such a shortage, and it’s going to be very challenging as a country. So, for us, what’s happening is supply is down, demand is there, and we love the opportunity because we’ve been doing it for 20 years. We’ve identified who we think are the best groups to manage and operate these properties. During the pandemic, we were bullish when people wanted to sell senior housing. We argued that it showed to be a very strong asset class, because, with the right operators, they know how to take care of people, and it is actually much safer as an asset class to invest in. Do the demographics for student housing also make sense? There’s a great opportunity, but you have to really understand the business, because not every school’s going to be the right school. We’re in a situation today where probably 15 to 20 percent of the U.S. colleges will fail. And, when you look at it, our focus is we want to be on the campuses of the schools where we’re seeing enrollment increases. That’s a lot of public institutions, the Power Four conference schools, the University of Michigans, the Arizona State Universities. There is a huge opportunity because probably only 20 to 30 percent of the kids can be housed on campus at the big public university. So there’s a big need. But you have to be very careful, you have to be at the right school, or you can make mistakes. How do you view the next five years for yourself in the firm? This is probably one of the better vintages we’ve seen to put capital to work in, just because of the lack of supply. We’ve spent 20 years developing these relationships, so, for us, we’re very excited to put capital to work over the next five years. We’ve also been recycling a lot of capital and returning capital to our investors, and that’s been exciting, showing really strong distributions to paid-in capital to our investors. It’s all about these demand asset classes. You’re seeing people increasing allocation into real assets. In an uncertain world, volatility is not your friend, and these asset classes are consistent, they’re there, they can generate good income returns in a rising interest rate and inflationary environment. These are asset classes you can reprice. We can reprice our leases on a monthly or annual basis. So there’s a lot of good benefits to these within a portfolio. What is the best advice you’ve received in your career? It probably came, again, from Chris Galvin. He always pushed me to innovate and be different. And he said, “People will tell you it’s risky, but it’s actually less risky, because you’re out there in front and you have the space to yourself.” Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com.