After completing billions of dollars of dispositions in the senior housing sector — Harrison Street is now following suit in student housing. The Chicago-based firm has announced a massive $910 million sale of a 7,578 -bed portfolio that's spread across 12 properties.
According to Harrison, this is the largest student housing portfolio sale to take place so far this year.
Also, the company noted that the deal continues to underscore institutional demand for student housing and high-quality product, while not disclosing the buyer.
The properties are located in 10 states and across 12 colleges, including the University of Florida, Arizona State University and Auburn University.
Since its founding, Harrison has invested more than $24 billion across 431 beds in the student housing sector in both the North American and European markets. Also, since then, it has completed roughly $11 billion in sales in the sector across 252 assets.
"This portfolio reflects the culmination of years of disciplined acquisition and development activity, operational enhancement and optimization by our team, and local market expertise across some of the strongest university-driven housing markets in the country," Ben Mohns, global head of asset management of real estate at Harrison, said in a statement.
"The ability to execute a transaction of this scale in today's environment speaks to both the quality of the communities in which we've invested and the enduring investor appetite for institutional-grade student housing portfolios."
The move comes after Harrison announced in April that it completed $2 billion worth of dispositions in the senior housing space over the past year. This included a five-property portfolio in Long Island, New York, which it fetched more than $600 million for.
Going forward, Christopher Merrill, co-founder and Global CEO at Harrison, said that the company will "continue to invest in high-quality student housing properties near leading universities," while evaluating its portfolio and moving to conduct a sale where it makes sense.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.