Jonathan Rose Companies Taps Brandon Kearse as President and CIO

Multifamily and mixed-use developer Jonathan Rose Companies has appointed Brandon Kearse as president and chief investment officer, Commercial Observer can first report. 

Founder Jonathan F.P. Rose will remain CEO and chair of his namesake company’s investment committee, while Carolyn Au has been named managing partner and chair of the management committee. 

In his decade at the New York-based company, Kearse has helped scale its impact investment portfolio to almost 20,000 affordable and mixed-income units across the country. He joined the firm in 2015 as an associate director and was most recently co-CIO alongside Rose. In his new role, Kearse will take the reins on impact investment strategy nationally, overseeing acquisition and recapitalization activities as well as investor relations. 

The company’s history is steeped in environmental sustainability and socially responsible investment — with Rose founding the company in 1989 with a focus on community-first, sustainable affordable housing development — and it’s a legacy that Kearse is excited to continue building, he told CO. 

It all started with an internship and a glimpse into a career Kearse saw himself in for the  long term.

“Frankly, I arrived here for what was supposed to be a pre-MBA summer internship, and it was at the end of that internship when it was time to leave and go back, that I said, ‘Nope, this is what I want to do. This puts together everything that I’ve spent my education learning about, spent my career building towards, and these are the people that I want to work with,’ ” Kearse told CO. “In your career, you often make certain trade-offs between whether you get to work with kind people or hardworking people or intelligent people, and I felt like I’d won the lottery finding a place where I got to work with people that are all three.” 

Nathan Taft, the firm’s previous CIO who died in February 2025, was Kearse’s mentor and boss at the time, and, after some back and forth, agreed to hire him. “He said, ‘The business is growing. You take a chance on us and we’ll take a chance on you.’ And, as fate would have it, it all happened to work out,” Kearse said. 

One of Kearse’s biggest career-defining moments came early in his tenure, leading Jonathan Rose’s acquisition of Forest City’s federally assisted housing portfolio in 2017. At the time, the company’s portfolio was around 5,000 units, and that transaction added 8,000 units. 

“That project really allowed us to step from what had been a series of single-investor funds to our first multi-investor fund,” Kearse said. “I certainly didn’t do that alone, but I’ll forever be proud of the work that we’ve done with that portfolio, both in how it helped grow the company and how we get to continue stewarding those assets into the future. In affordable housing, we work with some of the most vulnerable populations in the country, and so to the extent that you can be long-term stewards of assets it’s very helpful to those communities.” 

 While several firms have scaled back their commitments to environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) efforts during the past few years, Jonathan Rose Companies hasn’t. 

“Nationwide we have seen the pendulum swing back and forth, but for us there is no pendulum,” Kearse said. “Jonathan started the business nearly 40 years ago with a specific focus on sustainability and affordability, so it’s in our DNA to build mixed-income, mixed-use communities that tie together the urban fabric. We want to build energy-efficient buildings, we want to build healthy buildings that are good for us and our residents and for the world, we want to have social impact, because we think that making people’s lives better is mutually beneficial not just for those people, but for the communities they’re in and for the for the stability of the housing that we build for them.” 

Roughly three-quarters of the work Jonathan Rose Companies undertakes today is preserving existing affordable housing stock. Taft began the work of building out the company’s impact investment platform, work that Kearse will continue to build on in his new role.  When Kearse joined, the company was deploying a preservation fund in the region of $50 million, and it closed a $660 million fund last year. It’s working on projects in New York, but also farther afield in New England, California and Georgia. 

“We’re using some of the more traditional affordable housing tools to do more LIHTC preservation and we’ve been very busy with those tools in Georgia,” Kearse said, referring to Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. “On the new development side, building on everything Jonathan did with Highland Garden Village [a transit-oriented development in Denver], we’re excited to be doing transit-oriented developments that are mixed-income and mixed-use. Going forward, we’ll be seeking out as many projects that can be multi-phase as possible, where we can continue to invest in the community year after year after year.” 

The company’s development work is what Kearse describes as “our laboratory where we really get to push the envelope on sustainability, net zero, electrification, energy efficiency — where we get to do innovative things with how buildings are shaped, whether that’s prefab or modular.” 

It includes a “cool multi-phase development” in Burlington, Vt., in conjunction with Hula, a local angel investment firm, and a recently awarded contract from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to build Beacon Station, a 265-unit development on the site of a parking lot in Beacon, N.Y.

At a time when the affordable housing crisis is at a severe apex, there are wins and challenges for those trying to problem-solve creation and preservation. 

“The hallmark of affordable housing development in our country is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and the various [Housing and Urban Development] programs, and last year we saw a record-breaking increase in the amount of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits allocated,” Kearse said. “Notwithstanding that, we’re still in a high construction cost environment, a high interest rate environment, a high operating cost environment that makes delivering affordable housing ever more challenging. But what we’re seeing is different states and local governments come to the table in ever more meaningful ways.” 

Kearse grew up in Aiken, S.C., and was the first person in his family to attend college.

“I think what excites me about our business is the chance to give as many people new opportunity as we can,” he said. “We can give employees the opportunity to step up from their backgrounds, and we can give our residents a leg up in their backgrounds, too. I had a great mentor that pointed me in the right direction, and I view our business as an apprenticeship model. I want everybody to take a step up on the work that their predecessors did and pour into the cups of those people who are following in their footsteps.” 

Now that he’s the company president, there’s nothing Kearse would like to change, per se — but there’s plenty he wants to grow. “We want our fund sizes to continue to increase,” he said, “so that we can preserve more housing and do more development deals in multiple phases, so that we can have enduring impact on the communities surrounding them.”

Cathy Cunningham can be reached at ccunningham@commercialobserver.com.