Harrison Street

Investment decisions sit with the firm's sector-focused investment committees, which are overseen by co-founders Christopher Merrill and Michael Galper alongside senior managing directors leading each vertical — student housing, senior living, medical office, life sciences, and infrastructure. Merrill, as CEO, holds ultimate approval authority for large commitments. Executive Chairman Christopher Galvin advises on governance and strategic direction but does not lead day-to-day deployment.

Harrison Street sources most deals through programmatic joint ventures with specialist operating partners — student-housing operators like The Scion Group, senior-living managers like Merrill Gardens, and university or health-system affiliates. Because the firm often provides development capital or structured take-out financing directly to these partners, it enters transactions off-market rather than competing in broker-led auctions. This partnership model accounts for a majority of its annual deployment.

Harrison Street is a specialist asset manager, not a family office. It was founded in 2005 by real estate investment professionals and manages commingled funds and co-investment vehicles on behalf of institutional limited partners, including public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and insurance companies. The firm does not manage a single family's capital.

Harrison Street originates and manages direct investments in operating companies and physical assets. It does not operate as a fund-of-funds and does not allocate capital to third-party fund managers. LPs access its strategies through closed-end commingled funds, separate accounts, and co-investment structures, all deployed directly into property and infrastructure assets or development platforms.

The firm does not invest in traditional office, retail, industrial, or hospitality unless the asset is ancillary to a demographic theme — a café in a medical office building, for example. It also avoids single-family residential, self-storage, and data centers, concentrating instead on sectors with observable demographic demand drivers: student housing, senior living, medical office, life science labs, digital-health infrastructure, and energy-transition assets.

Harrison Street has built a vertical leadership structure in which senior managing directors run each sector group with significant autonomy, while co-founders Merrill and Galper remain active in risk and capital-allocation decisions. Executive Chairman Christopher Galvin provides additional governance oversight. The firm has not publicly announced a specific CEO succession plan, but the investment pods and multi-generational managing-director layer reduce key-person dependency relative to other founder-led real estate managers.

Harrison Street has not established a dedicated philanthropic foundation or impact-investing label tied to the firm. However, its core portfolio — senior living, student housing, healthcare delivery infrastructure, and energy-transition assets — inherently targets social and demographic outcomes. The firm reports ESG metrics to LPs through standard institutional frameworks but does not market a separate impact fund.