Chris Merrill, Co-Founder and CEO of Harrison Street, shares his insights from a dynamic career in real estate. He discusses his early experiences as a pioneering investor in Central Europe and how they shaped his unique approach. Chris reveals the challenges he faced in promoting unconventional asset classes like student housing and healthcare. He emphasizes the power of building strong partnerships with operators and the strategic shift towards infrastructure investments, highlighting the importance of innovation and a long-term mindset in achieving success.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Combine Innovation with Rigorous Process
Pair innovation with rigorous process and risk management to succeed.
Avoid investing in markets lacking rule of law or liquidity to limit risk.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Founding Harrison Street Partnership
Harrison Street started as a 50-50 partnership focused on demographics-driven real assets.
Chris Galvin from Motorola provided capital and instilled a culture of quality and innovation.
insights INSIGHT
Alternatives Evolved From Niche to Core
Alternative real estate asset classes were once dismissed as non-institutional and risky.
Over time, education, healthcare, and storage proved resilient and essential need-based investments.
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Chris Merrill, Co-Founder and CEO of Harrison Street, joins Brandon Sedloff to explore a career defined by risk-taking, innovation, and a steadfast belief in building differentiated real estate strategies. The conversation traces Chris’s early career in real estate through his formative years at Heitman, where he became one of the first Western investors to focus exclusively on Central Europe. That experience would inform the thesis behind Harrison Street—an investment firm centered on demographic-driven, need-based asset classes like student housing, medical offices, and self-storage. Chris shares how Harrison Street emerged from a 50-50 partnership with Motorola’s former CEO Chris Galvin, and how its success has hinged on developing deep operator relationships, a repeatable process for innovation, and a long-term perspective on risk and value creation.
They discuss:
Why building a “pure play” Central European fund shaped his thinking on innovation and differentiation
The early resistance to student housing, senior living, and self-storage as institutional asset classes
How Harrison Street built an edge through proprietary scorecards and diversified operator relationships
Why vertical integration was never the right strategy for Harrison Street’s alternative real estate focus
How infrastructure and on-campus partnerships are fueling the next phase of growth
This episode is a masterclass in how to spot arbitrage opportunities and scale a business by staying contrarian.
(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:01:39) - Chris’ background and career
(00:12:22) - Capital raising in the mid-90s
(00:15:25) - Founding Harrison Street
(00:22:11) - What Harrison Street looks like today
(00:23:24) - The evolution of Alternatives within Private Real Estate
(00:25:26) - Investing strategies
(00:32:42) - Milestones from the last 2 decades
(00:34:46) - Failures
(00:37:35) - What best-in-class operating partners look like
(00:42:43) - Vertically integrated vs. allocator models
(00:44:30) - Pivoting into infrastructure
(00:48:19) - Making an ownership shift
(00:52:16) - The intersection of innovation and Real Estate
The Distribution by Juniper Square