Richard Harris

Richard qualified as a Member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors in 1994, following an honours degree in Estate Management and two years professional training at Fuller Peiser (now Atis Real) and Rogers Chapman Plc (now Jones Lang La Salle).

In 1994 he joined the National Investment Department at Strutt & Parker, working directly with the Head of the Commercial Division on institutional clients such as Standard Life, Prudential, Henderson and Aberdeen Asset Managers. During that time he was involved in over £1bn of asset sales and acquisition advice throughout the UK in the retail, office and industrial sectors.

He was promoted to Partner in 1998 and his focus then moved to establishing a new client base of private high net worth and emerging Real Estate Opportunity Funds. He became the retained advisor to ESL, the UK representative to the Danish Invesment Fund and has since sourced around 150 properties for the fund in the nursing home, retail, supermarket, leisure and hotel sectors with a total current value of some £500 million.

In 2004, he resigned from Strutt & Parker and formed Vector Property Consultants working in tandem with ESL on Danish-owned property investment acquisitions and sales. In 2005, he advised on the acquisition of 20 care homes let to Ashbourne and has since advised on 50 homes totalling c£250m in value. In 2008 he advised Southern Cross Healthcare Group on the sale and leaseback of over £60m of elderly care homes held by the company. In the same year, he became property advisor to a specialist healthcare care group for suffers of Autism and is now advisor to The Priory Group on their property portfolio and capital raising via sale and leasebacks.

He is now using his extensive investor contacts and experience in the core property sectors to help promote healthcare as a viable investment product and change the general sentiment that healthcare is seen as an "alternative" investment rather than core.