Matt Ferrari: 'Now is the Most Exciting Time to Be an Apartment Investor'
When Matt Ferrari signed the term sheet launching PXV Multifamily, the setting was as elevated as his new mission—he was sitting at a base camp on Mount Everest, preparing to climb toward the 29,032-foot summit. The name itself, PXV, pays homage to that peak’s original English designation, Peak XV, given by geographers in the 1850s when they first measured its height.
For Ferrari, the former co-chief investment officer and head of East and Central region asset management at TruAmerica Multifamily, the decision to strike out on his own came only after careful reflection. “I would not have left for some average setup to build my own mousetrap,” he told GlobeSt.com. “I love TruAmerica, I love [CEO Robert Hart], I love the team. I would only do it if it was the right partner at the right time and I was jazzed for it.”
That partner emerged in BroadVail Capital Partners, which is capitalizing PXV as it makes its entry into the multifamily sector. With that backing, Ferrari saw the chance “to be the head coach instead of the offensive coordinator or third-base coach.”
PXV Multifamily targets opportunities spanning “middle-market value-add” to “institutional quality” assets in key markets across the United States. Ferrari said his new firm’s approach reflects both his drive for innovation and the lessons drawn from a period of upheaval in the apartment sector.
“I don’t think there’s necessarily anything my previous company was doing wrong, but I think now is the most exciting time to be an apartment investor,” he said. The pandemic years brought a wave of new players into the multifamily space, but many lacked operational experience. Then came the reset. “Operations didn’t matter until they mattered,” Ferrari said. “Interest rates jumped. Costs leaped. Capital stacks went upside down. You had to learn to control the noncontrollable. It weeded out the pretenders from the contenders. If you do know what you’re doing, you should be able to attract capital, identify the assets, and operate them.”
For Ferrari, those lessons shaped PXV’s focus on operational precision and adaptability. “Everyone’s got to constantly look for an edge,” he said. “I call it the multifamily doom loop. One cog breaks and then things spiral out of control.” The firm will pursue value creation through multiple levers—“what you buy, how you capitalize it, how you operate it, how you add value.”
Underlying it all is Ferrari’s philosophy of “controlled chaos,” balancing structure and freedom in pursuit of outperformance. “We want enough process to have a company that maximizes our efforts, our returns,” he said, “but we don’t want to have a process that is suffocating and now slows you down.”
Source: GlobeSt/ALM