Global black swan events, generally considered to be once-in-an-economic-cycle occurrences, have been disrupting investment markets with alarming frequency. In the past few years, we have experienced Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts.

The economic uncertainty arising from the US government’s current tariff policies is only the latest in this series of black swan events. The accelerating pace of such events underscores the importance to investors of allocating to assets with stable performance over time.

When Harrison Street entered Europe in 2015, alternative sectors such as purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) and build-to-rent (BTR) were considered niche real estate asset classes.  Other alternatives, such as senior housing, self-storage and life sciences were even more nascent. Scalable, institutional-quality opportunities in these sectors were few and far between.

Today, the opposite is true. It is increasingly evident that in