Matt Ferrari Exits TruAmerica to Start New Multifamily Investment Platform

Matt Ferrari may have summited Mount Everest this year, but there’s no rest in sight quite yet, because he now has a mountain of a different kind to scale. 

Ferrari has left his position as co-chief investment officer and head of East Coast acquisitions for TruAmerica Multifamily to launch his own multifamily investment and operating firm, PXV Multifamily, Commercial Observer has learned.  

Backed by Houston-based private equity firm BroadVail Capital Partners and based out of Miami, PXV has plans  to acquire as much as $2 billion in multifamily assets in the next 36 months. 

The firm is being launched at an opportune time in the market and Ferrari, an industry veteran, intends to hit the ground running.

“Asset values are down 20 to 40 percent, and we’re digesting this wave of supply that looks to be on the downslope,” Ferrari said. “From a fundamentals perspective I think now — more than ever — is the most exciting time to be a multifamily investor, because you have upside down capital stacks. You have entrants into the space who, frankly, were better capital raisers than they were operators, and you have mismanaged assets and a disparate range of cap rates. I think it’s a time where an operator with an operations-first approach can really differentiate themselves.” 

BroadVail had been looking for the right entry point into the multifamily sector for quite some time, having already invested $4 billion in the industrial, self-storage and affordable housing sectors. All it needed was the right person to lead the new investment strategy. 

“We’ve waited a long time to find the right team within this highly mature sector, but we believe our patience will be rewarded with Matt Ferrari at the helm,” Robby Zorich, a managing partner at BroadVail, said. “After a nearly three-year search for an individual to lead a multifamily platform, Matt stood out amongst the crowd, having actively led a highly successful national multifamily platform as co-CIO, while at the same time managing institutional relationships, sourcing new deal flow and asset managing assets across the Eastern U.S. — the combination of which we see as incredibly unique.” 

The timing was right for Ferrari, too. “On a personal level, where I am age-wise and career-wise lines up nicely with this next chapter of my career, and, despite what an amazing run it was at TruAmerica, it’s tough to not give this a shot,” he said. 

A big differentiator for PXV is Ferrari’s deep experience in not only investing in multifamily but also operating assets. 

Ferrari got his career start in property management, working for Archstone Communities in a development and leadership rotational program. He worked on the firm’s operating side for two years, working in every role from the front desk of buildings to leasing apartments to managing a few individual high-rises in Manhattan before becoming a regional manager.

When Archstone was sold to AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential in 2012, Ferrari learned the transaction side as investments director. He joined TruAmerica in 2016 as its Eastern U.S. director of acquisitions, before scaling the ranks to become co-CIO. During his time at the firm he ramped up TruAmerica’s assets under management from $6.2 billion to $15.2 billion. 

Ferrari is now building his new pipeline at PXV and — with plenty of opportunity in the market — there’s no such thing as an ideal deal or risk profile. 

 “If this was the previous cycle, you’d say, ‘Are you coastal gateway? Are you secondary city? Are you Sun Belt? Are you value-add? Are you core or core-plus?’ But it’s a totally different situation that we’re in today,” Ferrari said. “In the last cycle, Class B [multifamily] outperformed Class A, but is that going to happen going forward? I don’t know, because the world is different. There are different impacts on different renter profiles, and the reality is it really comes down to the deal. You can see brand-new deals with an upside down capital stack, or a developer who was hoping to only own a deal for 12 to 18 months and is now going to be stuck owning the deal for a couple years longer. There could be a syndicated workforce deal that has an upside-down capital stack, and cap rates between the core deals and the Class B deals are the widest they’ve ever been. 

“So now — more than ever — you have to be a little geographically agnostic, and you have to be a little risk profile agnostic because of the unique situation and time we’re in.” 

PXV also won’t be shying away from distressed scenarios, and it says it has the data to guide it to the most savvy opportunities. 

“There’s distress, and then there’s someone who wants to sell a deal because it’s time to move on,” Ferrari said. “We’re backed by a phenomenal data analytics team that BroadVail has, and so we’re going to have some insights that not everyone’s going to have that will allow us to make informed decisions on markets. It was something that really attracted me to partnering with the BroadVail team, and we’re definitely going to be considering any opportunities that could have some signs of stress or distress amongst all the other opportunities out there.” 

Only some 13,000 people have successfully summited Everest, and, as Ferrari begins his next chapter, his monumental accomplishment will be ever present. PXV is named after the mountain that was initially referred to as “Peak XV” before it was determined to be the world’s tallest mountain and renamed after Sir George Everest (a British surveyor who was leading the British Trigonometric Survey of the Himalayas at the time).

“My next mountain to climb is building out this company,” Ferrari said. “I love climbing, and I hope to do some shorter, less time-consuming climbs next year, but I don’t have anything kind of in the works, because the current climb is filling out the team at PXV  and finding some great opportunities. I want to get this expedition going.” 

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