PHOTO: Courtesy Artemis Real Estate Partners
Deborah Harmon
Co-founder and co-CEO at Artemis Real Estate Partners
After a stellar 17-year career as the lead global real estate investor at J.E. Robert Companies, Deborah Harmon retired in 2007, expecting to be rewarded with a leisurely retreat into a healthy economy. Little did she know, capital markets were at their pre-meltdown peak.
“Sometimes in life it’s better to be lucky than smart,” Harmon said. “My retirement was short-lived — it turned into a sabbatical — because the Global Financial Crisis hit in 2008, and it was an interesting reminder for me that in the darkest of periods come great opportunities.”
That great opportunity came when businesswoman Penny Pritzker (who would later become commerce secretary in the Obama administration) asked Harmon to join her in starting a private equity real estate firm. Sensing untold investment opportunities amid the generational distress, Harmon jumped at the opportunity in February 2009.
“My goal was to create an organization that produced superior returns on behalf of our investors, but also proved that organizations that maybe looked different — where diversity was the foundation of our culture — would outperform [other firms] over time,” she said. “When I looked around and didn’t see any women-owned real estate private equity firms, I didn’t want to leave the industry worse off from a diversity perspective.”
It took Harmon 225 meetings and 22 months to raise Artemis’s first value-add fund, which closed in June 2011 with $436 million. Over the next 10 years, its second hard-capped fund closed with $536 million, and a third, uncapped fund closed with $1 billion. Its fourth value-add fund, Artemis Fund IV, closed in June 2023 with $2.2 billion in equity commitments.
Together with the $1 billion the firm’s Healthcare Fund II raised in June 2022 and a $500 million core credit platform, the Chevy Chase, Md.-based Artemis now has roughly $3 billion on hand to invest in distressed real estate opportunities.
“I deeply believe in partners,” Harmon said. “The success of Artemis is small part due to me and large part due to my partners.”
