TruAmerica's Matt Ferrari Launches New Multifamily Firm Targeting 'Mismanaged' Assets

Scaling Mount Everest and founding his own company are two challenges Matt Ferrari chose to tackle in the same year.

After nine years with TruAmerica Multifamily, Ferrari has left his role as co-chief investment officer and head of East and Central region asset management to launch PXV Multifamily — a new private multifamily investment and operating firm based in Miami.

Ferrari founded PXV with backing from Houston-based BroadVail Capital Partners, marking the real estate private equity firm’s first entrance into traditional multifamily. BroadVail has specialized in industrial, self-storage and affordable housing to this point and executed about $4B in deal flow.

In the release announcing his new firm, Ferrari said he aims to buy buildings across the country that were acquired in the feverish market of 2021 and 2022 and are now “mismanaged.”

“There's upside-down capital stacks,” Ferrari told Bisnow in an interview Wednesday. “There's operators who don't know how to operate properly because they entered the space when capital was plentiful.”

He plans to acquire $2B of properties over the next three years, focusing on individual assets and portfolios made up of 1980s vintage apartment buildings and newer assets with 150 units or more.

“There's a lot of developers who built deals that are not worth what it cost them to build them today, and they're going to have to figure out something to do,” he said.

“They may have to end up selling for less than they paid, or what they paid, or below today's replacement cost,” he added. “I think that's an exciting time to be an apartment buyer.”

Ferrari, who also worked at AvalonBay Communities and Archstone, left his job at Los Angeles-based TruAmerica, which owns roughly 40,000 apartments, on Friday.

He plans to hire PXV's first handful of employees in the coming weeks and is finalizing the company’s office space in Brickell, although he declined to give specifics.

He also declined to name geographies he would target for acquisitions, saying only that PXV will look for opportunities in both suburban and urban infill areas and “eventually build up national coverage.”

“Certainly, the fact that we're based in Miami should give us an opportunity to scour the South Florida market quite well, because we're physically there,” he said. “But it's going to come down to the specific opportunity and deal itself.”

Ferrari said PXV has “several hundred million dollars to deploy” and has the option of leveraging joint ventures or using LP equity to boost the equity it can put into acquisitions.

“We should be able to scale that several hundred million dollars into a $2B portfolio given the capital that we have at our fingertips, which is really exciting,” he said.

Rents have softened across the multifamily sector amid macroeconomic uncertainty, a slowdown in leasing and a record wave of new construction. Even Miami, one of the nation's most expensive markets, has felt the pressure.

But Ferrari isn't afraid to take risks, especially after climbing Mount Everest this May.

And falling interest rates and a rise in private credit have fueled a comeback in the transaction market. Sale volumes in the multifamily sector are up 13% year-over-year, while distressed property sales were up 20% in the third quarter.

Nearly $770B in multifamily loans will mature between this year and 2027, according to a second-quarter Newmark U.S. Multifamily Capital Markets Report — suggesting some distressed opportunities may come about.

Ferrari isn't banking on that.

“Everyone's been talking about distress for three years, and it's really been some stress, but not a lot of distress,” Ferrari said. “Of course, we would love to take advantage of distress opportunities like everyone else is telling everyone. We'll see if that ever comes to fruition.”