Walter Schmidt

Walter Schmidt is a co-founder and Senior Managing Partner of Rockwood Capital, a real estate investment and advisory firm founded in 1995. He is based in New York City and has roughly 36 years of experience in the real estate industry. He sits on Rockwood's Management Committee, working with the other Managing Partners to set the firm's overall strategic direction and to execute critical firm initiatives, and he serves on the firm's Investment Committees. During his tenure he has held lead acquisition and asset-management roles.

Schmidt began his career in 1984 at Touche Ross & Co. (now Deloitte). From 1986 to 1995 he advanced from Associate to Vice President at Competrol Real Estate Limited, where he was responsible for asset management of the firm's East Coast portfolio. After co-founding Rockwood in 1995, he was responsible for acquisition, asset management, and disposition activities on the East Coast, a role he held through roughly 2010. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Adelphi University.

Rockwood Capital provides equity and debt capital for core, core-plus, value-add, and special-situation real estate across property types including office, residential, retail, data center, and hotel. Since inception, Rockwood and its principals have invested in approximately $39 billion of real estate and real estate-related assets, and the firm currently manages more than $13 billion on behalf of 120+ institutional and private clients, including public and private pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, insurance companies, and high-net-worth families. Rockwood is a subsidiary of publicly traded Colliers International (NASDAQ: CIGI).

In October 2025, Rockwood Capital agreed to integrate its operations into Harrison Street Asset Management (HSAM), a global real-assets platform with more than $100 billion in AUM that is also a Colliers subsidiary. Under that integration, Rockwood's co-managing partners Tyson Skillings and David Becker became Co-Chief Strategy Officers of HSAM, with an initial focus on U.S. residential credit.

• Invests as an institutional real estate principal — providing equity and debt capital for core, core-plus, value-add, and special-situation real estate opportunities, not venture/seed-stage company investments.
• Property-type breadth: office, multifamily/residential, retail, hotel, R&D/life science, and data center assets, primarily in key U.S. markets.
• Combines capital with hands-on operating expertise for repositioning, recapitalization, development, and redevelopment of assets.
• Schmidt's personal focus areas span acquisitions, development, refinancing, recapitalization, and opportunity-zone investments, historically concentrated on the U.S. East Coast.
• Deploys institutional pools of capital (pensions, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, insurers) rather than writing personal angel checks.