As Rob Lester sets up Sun Belt apartment firm Carroll's shop in Los Angeles, he's preparing to hit the ground running.
Atlanta-based Carroll hired Lester this month as senior managing director of capital markets and investments following a six-month period during which the firm closed on 29 multifamily transactions with an aggregate value of more than $2 billion, entered a new market in the West and added four other executives.
In the second quarter, Carroll and PGIM Real Estate sold a 12-apartment-complex portfolio with 3,564 units in Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee to Clarion Partners and Blackfin Real Estate Investors for $885 million.
Lester, who has more than 20 years of capital markets experience, joined Carroll from a Los Angeles-based family office where he worked the past three years. Before that, he worked at Brookfield Financial and Macquarie Capital and spent nearly a decade at Blackstone/Park Hill Real Estate, which investment giant Blackstone spun off in 2014.
Adding Lester is a key part of Carroll's expansion, founder and CEO M. Patrick Carroll said.
"Having Rob's expertise in-house will help our platform quickly scale to meet the growing demands of the market," Carroll said in a statement.
Founded in 2004, Carroll recently entered the Phoenix market as part of its expansion strategy in high-growth markets. It also reentered the Austin, Texas, market with a recent acquisition.
And earlier this year, Carroll resumed ground-up development of multifamily projects, and that prompted the firm to hire Stephen Hendrix as managing director of development and Sean Griffin as vice president of development.
Carroll's multifamily development venture, reestablished in February, has a pipeline of more than 1,100 units in the Atlanta and Jacksonville and Orlando, Florida markets. It expects to start construction in the fourth quarter on a new complex in Atlanta.
The firm also added Rob Gayle as vice president of business development and hired Franco Minton as its new managing director of people.
The company said it plans to "maintain its pursuit of strategic acquisitions across the Sun Belt" during the second half of the year. "This aggressive acquisition approach will drive the capital project spending to levels above those in 2021," it said.
As for Lester, he said he joined Carroll "during a time of tremendous opportunity," and that he looks forward to furthering the firm's growth.