Adelman's Campus leads fund to buy $1B+ in student housing

David J. Adelman's West Philadelphia-based Campus Apartments has been joined by New York-based Clarion Partners to raise $402.9 million, mostly from U.S. and foreign institutional investors, for Campus-Clarion Student Housing Partners LP, a closed-end fund to buy U.S. student housing.

"We had a longstanding relationship with Clarion," Adelman told me. CORRECTED: Campus considered doing a fund with Clarion in 2006, but ended up working instead with the Government of Singapore in that earlier effort. "They heard we were going out to raise this fund, and they offered to be the back-office support," Adelman added. Campus will find the deals and operate the buildings. Clarion will oversee investor reporting.

The partners say they will be able to leverage their equity, plus loans, to buy $1.2 billion worth of projects across the U.S., with up to 20,000 beds, making this "the largest student housing fund by a vertically-integrated manager," Adelman says.

"The fund benefits from a strong partnership between two platforms with a long and successful track record of investing in real estate," said the portfolio's manager, Rob Greer, who is also managing director at Clarion Partners, in a statement.

Campus Apartments owns 28,000 beds in projects it says are worth $2 billion. Last year it built dorms for St. Joseph's University and Shippensburg State University, among others. It manages housing for schools including Howard University as well as private off-campus housing. Clarion manages $33 billion in real estate assets in the U.S., U.K. and Latin America and claims 250 institutional investors.