Adam Petriella
Managing Principal, Silverthread Capital LLC
Rye, NY 10580
Managing Principal, Silverthread Capital
Phone (310) 403-1873
Managing Principal, Silverthread Capital
Property Types
Retail, Specialty, Multifamily
Markets
New York City, Westchester/So Connecticut
Bio
My career started in investment sales at Marcus & Millichap. I represented clients ranging from individual property owners to institutional names — Essex Properties, Oaktree Capital, AIMCO, Westport Capital. I earned production awards, but the part of that period I am most proud of is the people I worked alongside and occasionally mentored — some of whom went on to become top earners in the firm. I watched what separated the ones who built sustainable practices from the ones who did not. That observation never left me.
I moved into management — not a player-coach role, but full regional management. P&L responsibility, recruiting, training, performance coaching, standards enforcement, staffing, marketing, events. I turned around an underperforming office and brought it to third-highest grossing in the company. We had six of the top twenty earners firm-wide in our office at one point. I also initiated Marcus & Millichap's first New York metro office — which was one of the most instructive experiences of my career, because New York is not like anywhere else, and I learned that the hard way. I succeeded on some fronts and failed on others. Both were valuable.
I left the business to join an internet startup during the first wave — managing a four-million-dollar marketing and sales budget as part of a thirty-four-million-dollar initial raise. We grew fast and crashed with the rest of the market in 2000. I do not regret it. It taught me things about capital allocation, organizational velocity, and the gap between a compelling story and a viable business that I have used ever since.
I shifted into commercial real estate origination. The skills from investment sales transferred — but the motivational dynamics did not. A bank is not a buyer. An owner refinancing is not a motivated seller. The communication, the diligence, the relationship architecture — all of it had to be rebuilt for a different kind of counterparty. That recalibration became the foundation of how I teach deal qualification and lender relationship management today.
I was subsequently recruited into a New York-based credit fund with seven billion dollars in assets under management. The fund bought loan pools from banks — collateralized by single-family residential and small commercial real estate — and bifurcated them into risk-adjusted tranches. To complement that institutional strategy, a retail lending platform was built from scratch. My role was to generate mortgage origination volume through a network of wholly-owned Coldwell Banker Commercial franchises the fund had acquired across New York, Florida, California, Texas, and Colorado.
During COVID, I purchased three properties — including two manufactured housing parks. I also wrote Millionaire Mortgage Broker, which became the foundation of the learnCREF curriculum, and began developing the online training platform.
Education
