Inside Harrison Street’s Award-Winning Commitment to Healthy Senior Living

Best in Building HealthHealthy Building ProfilesStrategies & SolutionsFitwel Champions
Written By Marcos Reynaga

As part of our ongoing series featuring trailblazing real estate industry leaders who are setting the standard for Building Health, today we’re spotlighting Fitwel Champion and multi-award-winning firm Harrison Street.

AT A GLANCE

Awards:

 

Fitwel Excellence Award

Recognizing the Most Certifications of All-Time

Distinctions: 

Greatest Number of Certifications (Owner)

Greatest Number of Registered Projects (Owner)

Highest Scoring Projects:

Multifamily Residential v2.1: Design: Aster House Belfast (CAV), Belfast, UK

Senior Housing v2.1: Built: Harrison Street + The Springs Living at Greer Gardens, Eugene, OR

Senior Housing v2.1: Design: Harrison Street + The Springs Living for The Springs at Happy Valley

This year, Harrison Street achieved Fitwel’s highest honor, the Fitwel Excellence Award for the all-time greatest number of certifications, adding to their impressive awards roster over the past four years.

Harrison Street embodies Building Health for All through their wide-ranging efforts to improve well-being for their residents and employees. Fitwel provides them with a practical way to measure impact and feel assured they’re addressing their tenants’ needs while measuring themselves against their industry peers.

In the senior housing sector alone, they’ve invested ~$13 billion (USD) since 2005. Their leadership is perhaps best captured in our 2020 joint partnership to create and pilot Fitwel’s Senior Housing Scorecard, designed to address the industry’s most urgent needs, including historically high staff turnover, competitive workforce recruitment needs, and surrounding all of this, an aging population.

Three years after we launched our Senior Housing Scorecard, we’re thrilled to see Harrison Street’s impacts materialize with the double awarding of two senior housing assets with top honors this year. We’ll be sharing more about those projects in future posts.

Jill Brosig
Harrison Street Chief Impact Officer

We sat down with Jill Brosig, Chief Impact Officer at Harrison Street, whose title intentionally reflects the company’s commitment to demonstrating the proven impact of its strategy, to learn more about how Fitwel is an essential part of driving value.

Why has Harrison Street focused on “non-traditional” real estate classes?
JB: Our strategy is based on demographic trends and the resulting demand of those trends—an aging population that grows and lives longer, rising college enrollments, and a more mobile population. Since we started in 2005, our business strategy has always been to focus on what we see as the most stable, cycle-resilient real estate assets, including student housing, medical offices, senior living, and self-storage. Why? Because we believe that no matter what happens in the economy, people are still going to need to go to school, see the doctor, accumulate things and they will age.

Fitwel v2.1 Scorecard Worksheet - Senior Housing Scorecard (Excel)

Use this Fitwel v2.1 Senior Housing Scorecard Worksheet to assess site level projects against strategies in the Senior Housing Scorecard.

Why did Harrison Street pursue Fitwel?
JB: From our founding, there has been an element of health and wellness integrated into our business. It’s very purposeful that my title is Chief Impact Officer. The reason is that everything we do should impact our stakeholders. Our mission is to set the standard for excellence when it comes to healthy buildings, particularly among senior and student housing communities. Together, the Senior Housing Scorecard and the Fitwel Certification process enable us to gauge the effectiveness of our health-promoting initiatives, which in turn influences investment decision-making and I believe will ultimately increase valuations.

How do you quantify the impact of healthy buildings on investment value?
JB: The industry lacks clearly defined ESG metrics for demographic-driven assets, people-centric assets. That’s why we’re working with the Center for Active Design [the operator of Fitwel] on studies that look at ESG more broadly, but our focus is on the S. I believe the emphasis on the S is a differentiator for Harrison Street. We want to better understand and show the impact that healthy building strategies have on tangible value for real estate, for instance, lease-up times, valuations, and rent premiums. To do this, we’re building on past studies, including MIT's that found office buildings certified as healthy in 10 large US cities commanded 4.4% to 7% higher rents per square foot than their nearest non-certified peer properties.

Source: MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab “The Financial Impact of Healthy Buildings.”

Fitwel Champions like Harrison Street are implementing Fitwel Healthy Building Certification at scale. Learn more about the benefits of joining these industry leading pioneers in building health and wellbeing at fitwel.org/champions.

About Harrison Street
Harrison Street is one of the leading investment management firms exclusively focused on alternative real assets. Since inception in 2005, the firm has created a series of differentiated investment solutions focused on demographic-driven, needs-based assets. The firm has invested across senior housing, student housing, healthcare delivery, life sciences and storage real estate as well as social and utility infrastructure. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in Berlin, London, Luxembourg, Madrid, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto and Washington DC, the firm has more than 260-employees and approximately $56 billion in assets under management. Clients of the firm include a global institutional investor base domiciled in North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Harrison Street was awarded Best Places to Work by Pensions & Investments for eight years (2014-2020, 2022) and has won multiple awards from PERE, including five for the 2022 Awards: Alternatives Investor of the Year - Global, Industry Figure of the Year - Global, Residential Investor of the Year - Global, Data Centers Investor of the Year - Global, and Residential Investor of the Year - North America. For more information, please visit www.harrisonst.com.

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Marcos Reynaga
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