Peak Condition: TruAmerica’s Matt Ferrari on Climbing Mount Everest’s North Col

In 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to summit Everest. Over the next 40 years, one in four climbers who attempted to follow in their shoes would die. But that isn’t enough to put Matt Ferrari, chief investment officer and head of East Coast acquisitions at investment firm TruAmerica Multifamily, off trying.

In fact, Ferrari just received confirmation that his second planned summit attempt of Everest next spring — this time of the more dangerous section of the mountain — is a go.

In May, he climbed the mountain’s North Col, also known as the Northeast Ridge. Entered from the Tibet side of the mountain, the North Col is the sharp pass carved by glaciers that connects Everest and Changtse, at 23,000 feet above sea level. Few could accomplish what Ferrari and his team — led by Alpenglow Expeditions, the same guiding company that will lead his summit attempt next spring — did, but Ferrari is quick to downplay the endeavor.

“When I said I was going to Everest, people thought the worst as they’ve only read about people dying there,” he said. “I draw the important delineation that I went to the north side of Everest, not the south side.”

Ferrari, 41, speaks humbly. While the south side has taken way more lives over the years — 330 to be exact — the north side is its own, often scary, animal. Climbing either side puts you at risk of hypoxia, hypothermia, illness and avalanche falls, but the North Col is a hostile environment from a weather perspective. Those who try to surmount it spend the majority of their time at its advanced base camp (ABC) at 21,500 feet — meaning their bodies are being put through the mill the entire time. It’s also taken its fair share of lives over the years, with 110 fatalities.

It’s not for everyone, but for Ferrari, a Rochester, N.Y., native who moved to Miami in 2020 to help expand TruAmerica’s East Coast footprint, there are plenty of parallels between navigating treacherous mountains and tackling the multifamily investment market. Ultimately, it all comes down to the management of risk. And with a $15 billion multifamily portfolio comprising roughly 60,000 apartment units, risk management is something he takes very seriously.

“Mountaineering and investing in commercial real estate both involve the underwriting of risk,” Ferrari said. “On Everest, I’m paying someone to help me measure the risk because I’m not an expert, but there’s preparation and there’s a process. [At TruAmerica] we have a similar approach to acquiring properties and how we operate them.”

In the mountains, many simple things can determine your success — from your clothing layering system to what you eat — but it all begins with preparation, and a healthy serving of determination.

“There’s also a determination or tenacity in acquiring apartment portfolios, right?” Ferrari said. “Sometimes it comes down to just being the most tenacious guy out there in finding a deal. So, when you combine a top-down approach, in all the prep we do ahead of time, with the bottom-up approach of being tenacious, managing the risk, relying on your team, and utilizing the right equipment, you see the similarities.”

To commemorate the completion of his recent climb, Ferrari planted a TruAmerica logo at the North Col (which surely beats a closing dinner at Nobu). 

Into thin air

Ferrari got his taste for mountaineering in perhaps a somewhat unusual way. “I read the book ‘Into Thin Air,’ where basically everyone dies, then I decided to go climb Mount Kilimanjaro,” he said. 

The book’s author, Jon Krakauer — a survivor of the most disastrous Everest expedition in history — decried amateur climbing enthusiasts in it, writing they had no business being on Everest. “Ironically, after he wrote his book — again, in which many people died — climbing Everest became more popular than ever,” Ferrari said. “I guess I was just one of those people that got intrigued by it, although I’d say I’m still pretty risk averse overall.”

Roughly 200 irretrievable bodies remain on Everest today. ​​“Everyone thinks, ‘that won’t happen to me,’” Ferrari said. “Then you read about the people who were being guided and died and you’re like, ‘All right, well, they’re actually just like me.’”

Kraukauer’s expedition took place in 1996 and things are a lot safer for climbers in general these days, which gives Ferrari some comfort.

“Assuming we don’t have some crazy storm, it all comes down to a physical test,” Ferrari said, adding, “I guess we’re all just looking for the next challenge in life.

Perhaps like opportunistic investment, if climbing were risk-free it probably wouldn’t be quite as exciting, and “it’s not that risky if you’re relying on the right team and doing it the right way,” he said.

Base camp

After conquering Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro in 2014, Ferrari started climbing as part of broader adventure travel with two friends from grad school. In 2014, after landing in Puerto Montt, they went to Puerto Varas in Chile, where there is a volcano. “We literally landed in Santiago, went to the information center and said: ‘We want to climb the volcano.’” They climbed it on crampons and he remembers it as being “pretty steep and pretty intense.”

In 2015, they flew to Bolivia, and climbed its highest peak, Mount Sajama, with some local guides — one of whom is now a world-class mountaineer who climbs 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen. In 2018, they climbed Mount Elbrus in Russia, an 18,510-foot dormant volcano that’s also one of the seven summits.

“We did Elbrus when the weather was pretty bad,” Ferrari recalls. “At the time, I was like ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. This is horrible. I never want to do this again.’ Everyone was turning around except us, then we summited and got down safely and I was like, ‘That was awesome!’ But I knew I really needed to learn to do a climb like that in the right way.”

He discovered Alpenglow Expeditions — an International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations-certified guide based near Lake Tahoe. The owner, Adrian Ballinger, had posted Snapchats while climbing Everest without oxygen in 2017, and that caught Ferrari’s attention.

“I looked them up and researched their basic style, and in 2018 I signed up for their Mexico climbing school,” Ferrari said. He climbed the tallest and third-tallest mountains in Mexico before COVID-19 hit. The world punched the pause button, but it wasn’t long before the itch returned. So Ferrari climbed Cotopaxi in Ecuador in 2021, then Aconcagua in Argentina —the tallest mountain in the Americas— in 2023.

The first time, he didn’t summit due to snow, his guide turning him around about 200 meters short of the summit. “It was disappointing, but it is what it is,” he said. “I’ve learned that if you do this long enough, you’re going to have bad conditions sometimes.” He signed up to climb Lenin Peak in Kyrgyzstan a few months later, but didn’t end up summiting there, either, due to some team members’ sickness.

Ferrari was a college baseball player but not an endurance athlete, and knew he had to up the ante to make his North Col climb a success. He hired a professional performance trainer who’s based in Chamonix in the French Alps, does vertical races, and held the world record for fastest climb of Aconcagua — three hours and 30 minutes from base camp to summit — which has since, believe it or not, been beaten.

The North Col climb required a rigorous training regimen to get him in, ahem, ‘peak’ condition. That regimen included a mix of strength and cardio training but also, importantly, intensive altitude training to acclimatize his body to oxygen deprivation.

So he slept in a hypoxic tent in his apartment for more than a month, and used a hypoxico machine — which reduces oxygen levels in surrounding air — to pre-acclimatize his body more rapidly. Ultimately, that allowed Ferrari to spend less time acclimatizing on the mountain itself, and shortened his climb time to two weeks, as opposed to three.

Training on a mountain wasn’t an option in sunny-and-flat Miami, but he made it work in his own way. “I guess it’s intense and people in Miami probably think I’m a weirdo when they see me on a stairmaster at the 1 Hotel for six hours,” Ferrari said, “wearing a backpack and carrying a bag of food.”

The climb

When the North Col expedition commenced this May, the team did a series of acclimatization hikes, reaching 18,000 and 19,000 feet before arriving at advanced base camp at 21,500 feet. It wasn’t all fun and games, by any means.

“I had [gastrointestinal] issues for a day and a half where I was just miserable,” Ferrari said. “For part of the time I was at ABC, I was like, ‘Oh, this climate is miserable,’ or ‘Man, I just want to hit the North Col and get out of here.’ But the day of the North Col climb was pretty epic — climbing with ropes, and it’s all snow for the most part. We had blizzard-like conditions and it was intense and tiring, but I never felt unsafe. You’re cold at night and you can’t breathe well, and maybe you don’t feel well here and there, so there are times you’re like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Then, you get down and say ‘OK, that was amazing.’”

The north side of the mountain had been closed to foreigners for five years, making the climb even more monumental. In spite of his success there, Ferrari said that he’s actually scared of heights. “I don’t like looking over my balcony in Miami,” he said. 

To the average man or woman at sea level, Ferrari’s North Col seems terrifying, but he said he never felt scared, specifically because crevasses weren’t really an issue. Indeed, crevasses, which can send climbers plummeting 300 feet if they open up on Everest’s south side, are definitely something to fear.

“On Lenin peak, I was freaking out about that,” he said. “Not to say there are no crevasses on the North Col, but I didn’t see any, whereas I saw them everywhere on Lenin Peak.”

As Ferrari looks ahead to his planned Everest summit next spring, he’s fully aware of the mountain’s track record, but puts his trust in his guiding company, Alpenglow. Last year was one of the deadliest years on record at Everest, with 18 fatalities recorded. Ferrari said many of those deaths were mountaineers who were lightly supported, or had a sherpa but no guide. “You didn’t see any of the major big Western guide companies have anything happen,” he said.

Mountain (multi)family

Climbing Everest isn’t exactly the normal water cooler chatter in a commercial real estate office. When hearing about his endeavors, Ferrari said his colleagues probably just think, “‘Oh, that’s Matt — par for the course,’” he said. “I’m a pretty intense, driven person in my professional life, and so it fits.”

As for his personal life? His girlfriend is supportive, but also thankful for advanced technology.

“Griffin Mims, who does marketing for Alpenglow was in Miami, and my girlfriend and I had dinner with him,” Ferrari said. “She vents about not being able to communicate with me when I’m [high up] on a mountain and [Griffin] tells her, ‘Well, he can get a Garmin Inreach [a hi-tech satellite communicating device].’ She was like, ‘What?! This device exists and you could have been talking to me this whole time?!’ So, guess what she got me for Valentine’s Day?”

Ferrari’s commitment to TruAmerica was unwavering even while on the North Col. While most people at the camp were likely focused simply on breathing, or not dying in the days to come, he worked and took calls from North Col’s basecamp where he had electricity, a desk and 5G cell service.

“It was harder to drive new business from there, but I could check in with the team and it meant I didn’t have to come home to 10,000 emails,” he said (we’re sure TruAmerica CEO Robert Hart will let him off this once).

And, when he came back down to earth, he didn’t skip a beat and got right back to work tackling a market with its own rough, and sometimes treacherous, terrain.

“On the growth side, it’s been a significantly better year for us than last year,” Ferrari said of TruAmerica’s recent investment activities. “I think it was good for us not to be overly busy on the transaction side in 2023, and more operations-focused. This year, my time has shifted to being more acquisition-focused, and I think we’re busier than most with the exception of a few groups who bought huge portfolios.

“Getting a deal done today is two or three times as complicated, and so we feel just as busy, even though maybe there’s less volume to show for it. I’d say it’s been a very productive first half of the year, and we’ll see how the rest of the year plays out,” Ferrari added.

Recently, the firm purchased Charleston Hall, a 194-unit community near Nashville, in an off-market transaction and a 284-unit complex in Ogden, Utah. It also acquired a townhouse development outside of Las Vegas in June.

Meanwhile, Ferrari’s mountain climbing continues to inspire his daily work at TruAmerica. In a market environment where nothing can be left to chance (or luck) he’s focused on preparation, due diligence, trust in his team, and following the process on an everyday basis, which leads to meticulously executed transactions and investments, regardless of the industry climate.

Everest, and that next important deal closing, waits for no man.