Harrison Street Asset Management has completed the sale of a large U.S. student housing portfolio totaling $910 million to affiliates of The Scion Group and an Ares Real Estate fund. Harrison Street reports that the disposition ranks as the largest student housing portfolio sale completed in 2026 to date.
The transaction covers 12 purpose-built student housing properties with a combined 7,578 beds. The communities serve major university markets across the country, including campuses anchored by the University of Florida, Auburn University, the University of Notre Dame, The Ohio State University and James Madison University. The assets were assembled over a 10-year period through five separate Harrison Street funds, reflecting a long-term aggregation strategy that culminated in this single portfolio exit.
Under the terms of the transaction, Scion will act as the operating partner for the portfolio. The deal also marks the first time Scion and Ares have partnered on a student housing investment, pairing a sector-specialist operator with a global real estate capital provider. Harrison Street and Scion, however, are not new counterparties; the firms have executed multiple large-scale student housing transactions together since 2017.
Those prior deals include a nearly $900 million student housing portfolio sale completed in November 2024, underscoring a multi-year pattern of sizable portfolio trades between the two groups. The latest sale continues that trend at an even larger scale and reinforces institutional appetite for beds in leading university markets.
Scion CEO Robert Bronstein described the acquisition as a milestone for the company on several fronts. He noted that the closing of this transaction lifts Scion’s owned portfolio to more than 105,000 beds, which he characterized as making Scion the world’s largest owner of student housing. Bronstein also highlighted what he sees as resilient demand characteristics in the student housing sector and framed the partnership with Ares as an opportunity to further expand Scion’s platform.
For Harrison Street, the sale represents a realization event for capital deployed across multiple funds over the past decade. For Scion and Ares, it adds a sizable cluster of beds in markets tied to high-profile universities, with Scion assuming ongoing operational responsibilities. The combination of scale, institutional counterparties and nationally recognized university affiliations positions the portfolio as a notable benchmark transaction in the 2026 student housing investment sales market.
