Christopher Merrill is co-founder and CEO of Harrison Street Asset Management, a global investment firm for alternative real estate assets. Founded over 20 years ago in Chicago with seed capital from the Galvin family (known for Motorola), Merrill acquired a $209 million investment fund during the global financial crisis. He was convinced that student housing, senior housing, medical office space, and self-storage would perform well regardless of the economic climate.
Today, Harrison Street Asset Management manages $109 billion in assets across real estate, infrastructure, and private debt. With headquarters in Chicago, Toronto, and London, the company also maintains offices and bases for its 600 employees in New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi.
Merrill’s career began at 18 as a summer intern at the Chicago-based real estate investment firm Heitman, where he rotated through various departments in successive summers, including property management, construction, and acquisitions. Shortly after graduating from college, he started full-time in Heitman’s acquisitions department.
A significant turning point in his career came when he began working on special projects for the chairman of the board. At that time, a local developer was exploring Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Merrill travelled with this developer for a few weeks through the region and returned with a report on the enormous opportunities in Central Europe. It was the mid-1990s, and the region, with 400 million consumers, suffered from a lack of commercial space, even though many US companies wanted to have a presence there.
Merrill convinced Heitman to give him the opportunity to build a business in Europe. In 1997, he moved to London to focus on the Central and Eastern European real estate market. There, he identified attractive investment opportunities; properties in Budapest, for example, achieved capitalisation rates of 12 to 14 per cent, while those in nearby Vienna were at 5 per cent. Despite lower liquidity, he saw the potential in markets that embraced capitalism after joining NATO. This forced him to build his own capital relationships, which led to the establishment of the first investment fund in Central Europe in the late 1990s.
When Merrill returned to the US in 2001, the idea arose to create something unique in investment management. Similar to Central Europe, where there was no dedicated Central and Eastern Europe fund, he wanted to focus on underserved niches. Colliers International acquired a 75 per cent stake in Merrill’s company for $550 million in 2018 and now uses Harrison Street as its primary investment management arm. Working closely with Colliers’ leadership, Merrill has pursued an acquisition strategy and doubled Harrison Street’s assets under management from $55 billion in the last year.
- —Student housing: High demand, steady income regardless of economic cycles.
- —Senior housing: Growth driven by an ageing population.
- —Medical office space: Resilient to economic fluctuations, as healthcare is always needed.
- —Self-storage: Flexibility and low operating costs.
