The VCMIX Auction Closed. The Next One Cannot Happen Before February 2027

Updated September 20, 2026: order entry closed on Friday, September 18, and this page has been rewritten in the past tense. What replaces the countdown is the rule that decides whether there will be another auction — it is in the prospectus, and it resets.

What the auction is

VCMIX is the ticker of the fund once called the Versus Capital Multi-Manager Real Estate Income Fund and now named the Harrison Street Real Estate Fund LLC (SEC CIK 1515001). It is an interval fund: it does not trade on an exchange, and its only built-in exit is a quarterly offer to buy back a set percentage of shares at net asset value. We have covered how that exit behaved over the last three years in the full VCMIX review.

The auction is a second, separate door. The fund's July 29, 2026 prospectus describes an auction process run by NFS (Nasdaq Fund Secondaries), and a supplement dated August 6, 2026 (accession 0001133228-26-011246) states that "The Fund has authorized NFS to implement the auction process" and that "the Fund's Repurchase Offer with the Repurchase Deadline Date of April 24, 2026 will constitute the first Repurchase Offer in this sequence."

The shareholder notice published on Nasdaq's site set out the rest. We read it on September 11, 2026, and the dates in it have now passed:

So the auction does not change how many shares the fund will buy back. It lets one holder sell to another buyer, at whatever price clears.

Why it exists: 14 quarters of partial fills

A quarterly repurchase offer is a promise to buy up to a fixed slice of the fund, typically 5%. When holders ask for more than that, everyone is filled pro rata. For VCMIX that has happened every quarter since January 2023. These are the offers since April 2025, from the fund's annual report for the year ended March 31, 2026 (accession 0001213900-26-065345):

Two things stand out. First, tenders have stayed near 19 to 20 million shares every quarter while the offer shrank from 6% back to 5%, so the fill rate fell from about a quarter to about a sixth. Second, the April 2026 figure comes from the subsequent-events note of the annual report; the July 31 result will not be filed until the semi-annual report for September 30. By the fund's own rule an auction only opens after two consecutive pro-rated offers, and this one opened on August 28 — which tells you, without waiting for the filing, that the fund treated the July 31 offer as pro-rated too.

Meanwhile the fund keeps shrinking. Net assets were $1,448,541,170 at June 30, 2026 (Form N-PORT), against about $3.21 billion at the March 2022 peak. Audited NAV per share was $23.25 at March 31, 2026.

The decision, in plain arithmetic

This is not investment advice, and the right answer depends on the size of the position, the need for cash and the tax picture. What can be laid out is the arithmetic each path implies.

Path one: keep tendering at NAV. If the fill rate stayed at 16.6% and a holder tendered the whole remaining position every quarter, the share still held would shrink like this:

That is a model, not a forecast: the fill rate has moved every quarter, and it depends on how many other holders tender. NAV can also move in either direction while you wait, and so far it has mostly moved down (from $31.42 at the peak to $23.25).

Path two: sell in the auction. You get out of the portion you sell now, at a price the prospectus says will likely be below NAV. The cost is the discount. A simple way to size it: the fund pays $0.24 a quarter, about 4.1% a year on a $23.25 NAV, and its July 23, 2026 Section 19(a) notice estimated 35.8% of that payment came from paid-in capital rather than income. A 10% discount is roughly two and a half years of that distribution, before tax.

Path three: both. Nothing in the notice stops a holder from selling part of a position in the auction and tendering the rest on October 23. The auction and the repurchase program are separate.

Path two is closed until at least February 2027. That is the practical change since this page was first written: a holder who did not sell by September 18 has, for now, only path one. The questions worth answering before the October 23 deadline:

1. What price did the September auction clear at, and how many shares traded? The prospectus says NFS makes the results of auctions in the last 12 months available to eligible investors after each close — worth asking your intermediary for, because it is the only price discovery these shares have.
2. Is your intermediary able to represent you at NFS at all? Buyers must be Eligible Purchasers represented by a firm that meets the platform's requirements, and the prospectus states that natural persons cannot currently purchase shares directly through it.
3. How does selling below NAV interact with your cost basis, given that part of past distributions was return of capital?
4. If you intend to tender on October 23 instead, has your custodian set an internal cut-off earlier than the fund's? The repurchase notice warns that intermediaries often do.

If the position is large enough that a few points of discount is real money, it is worth reading the fund's latest annual report line by line before choosing; we do that as a Forensic Filing Read, with every figure tied to its note, in 72 hours.

What this means beyond VCMIX

The same prospectus mechanism now exists at its sibling, the Harrison Street Real Assets Fund (VCRRX): an August 6, 2026 supplement (accession 0001133228-26-011243) names its May 29, 2026 offer as the first in its own auction sequence. No VCRRX auction had been announced when we checked on September 11.

For the wider category, the lesson is that "quarterly liquidity at NAV" and "a way out" are two different things. Interval funds do make their offers; Apollo Diversified Real Estate Fund filled about 27% of tendered shares at its May 2026 deadline, and our interval fund comparison ranks the category on exactly this. An auction adds a price for impatience. It does not add liquidity to the fund.

FAQ

Sources

• Harrison Street Real Estate Fund LLC, EDGAR filings (CIK 1515001)
• Form N-CSR, annual report for the year ended March 31, 2026, accession 0001213900-26-065345 (repurchase table; note 13, subsequent events)
• Form 424B3 supplement dated August 6, 2026, accession 0001133228-26-011246 (auction authorization and first offer in the sequence)
• Form 486BPOS, prospectus dated July 29, 2026, accession 0001133228-26-010977 (auction process)
• Form N-23C3A, repurchase notice for the July 31, 2026 deadline, accession 0001213900-26-072371
• Form N-PORT for June 30, 2026, accession 0001193125-26-373502 (net assets)
• Nasdaq, shareholder notice for the VCMIX auction (key dates, LODAS, pricing language), read September 11, 2026
• Harrison Street, 2026 repurchase offer and distribution calendar, and Section 19(a) notice of July 23, 2026