Greystar Student Housing Growth and Income Fund, an affiliate of Greystar Realty Partners, has entered into a $4.6bn agreement to acquire Education Realty Trust (EdR). The deal includes nearly 45,000 beds serving 47 universities in 26 states. In March, EdR started construction on the first phase of College View, a 1,600-bed student-housing community on the Mississippi State University campus. As part of the deal, Greystar is partnering with Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust to acquire 20 of EdR’s assets, mainly properties located close to several universities, for $1.2 billion. The portfolio Blackstone is acquiring includes assets adjacent to top-tier universities, including the University of California Berkeley, University of California, Riverside, University of Virginia, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, University of Colorado Boulder and Penn State. The takeover is expected to close in the second half of 2018, with BofA Merrill Lynch serving as exclusive financial advisor.
“We’ve been in the student housing business since 2008 when we acquired JPI, and the last five years or so, we’ve really dramatically grown our student housing business outside of the US, and while we continue to develop and do one-off joint ventures here in the US, we really hadn’t scaled up the opportunity,” Bob Faith, Greystar’s founder, chairman and CEO. “What made EdR attractive to us was it’s an amazing company with great people and culturally compatible.”
