Colliers’ Harrison Street Deal: A $600M Bet Worth Billions

How Colliers beat CBRE and JLL at their own game with one key acquisition.

Imagine if you could have purchased an investment manager 7 years ago that would see...
-- 3x revenue growth
-- 4x income growth
-- 30% margin expansion
-- 6x value appreciation

That's what Colliers did when it bought an interest in Harrison Street in 2018.

After recently upsizing its position and elevating a senior Harrison Street leader, it's been the gift that keeps on giving for Colliers.

Colliers is different than the other big brokerages in several ways, including its biggest shareholder's ownership.

Jay Hennick owns about 10% of the company, which is currently worth more than $850M.

A big driver of this wealth? The Harrison Street acquisition

-- Harrison Street is only 10% of Colliers' revenue but is 30% of its earnings.

-- Colliers is worth $8.3B in total, and we estimate that Harrison Street accounts for nearly half at about $4B.

-- At the time of the 2018, Harrison Street was valued at $600M.

No one could've seen how volatile the subsequent 7 years would be from a seat in 2018: a global pandemic, zero interest rates, runaway inflation and appreciation, then a sudden stop.

What would have been the best real estate buy of that era?
The Harrison Street acquisition may get our nod.

Another hindsight bias anecdote: this wasn't a win/lose deal. The seller was an aging Harrison Street founder. The owners and managers that stayed have grown AUM by nearly 6x and now have a gateway to compete head to head with the largest investment managers. ...perhaps a rare example of a 'win/win' M&A case study.

PS -- This is a great example of why it's so important to be able to follow the dollars in our industry. Sound interesting? DM us to explore joining our upcoming FastTrack cohort. Not many spots left.