Dive Brief:

• Eden Multifamily announced this week that it opened a new regional office in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area and hired former Bank of America executive Scott Phillips to lead the effort as senior vice president of Mid-Atlantic development.
• The Miami-based developer, which currently has 1,130 units throughout Central and South Florida under development, plans to use the Charlotte office as a springboard to growth in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, including select markets across North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia, according to a press release shared with Multifamily Dive. 
• Phillips spent 27 years with Bank of America in Charlotte, eventually taking a leadership role with the bank’s East Region executive team, working with commercial real estate companies. He also served as senior vice president for acquisitions and development with Charlotte-based Lat Purser & Associates and was a real estate broker. He will be responsible for building Eden’s Charlotte team in the coming months.

Dive Insight:

Eden, founded in 2015 by industry veterans Jay Jacobson and Jay Massirman, is one of many developers working to build apartments to capture the demand for rentals in the Southeast. 

Eden’s 2022 construction starts total more than $750 million and are expected to exceed $1.2 billion by mid-2023. 

“We are concentrating on just providing housing,” Jacobson told Multifamily Dive in an interview earlier this year. “We look at everything from simple three-story surface parking, walk-up apartment deals to high-rise apartments. We cover all different asset classes and all different price points. We are price-agnostic.”

In May, the company announced a joint venture with Sterling Equities, which has developed or invested in more than 65,000 residential units over the past half-century, to fuel that growth. The joint venture will target 2,500 starts per year in markets throughout Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, Jacobson told Multifamily Dive.

Efficiencies in Charlotte

Massirman also co-founded Charlotte-based property management firm RKW Residential in 2014. That company, bought by proptech provider Alfred this spring, oversees the leasing and management at many of Eden’s communities. That partially drove Eden’s decision to open an office in that city.

“Charlotte was a natural choice for us given its robust economy and adjacency to some of the most vibrant multifamily markets in the country — Raleigh, Nashville, Atlanta, Charleston,”  Jacobson told Multifamily Dive. 

Phillips’ long track record in commercial real estate made him an obvious choice to run the Charlotte office, Jacobson said.

“Bringing in Scott, who has long-standing experience in the commercial real estate financial sector, was also an easy decision,” Jacobson said. “When we hire senior-level positions, we always look for what I call someone with ‘hybrid vigor,’ which in our mind means someone who has experience in almost any related field but is smart, intuitive and has strong leadership skills.”

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