Matt Garrison
Chief Executive Officer, R2 Companies
Chicago, IL 60642
Phone (312) 226-9737
Property Types
Industrial
Markets
Chicago
Bio
Matt has an 18-year track record as a value investor driven by basis and cash flow fundamentals, successfully building investment strategies and platforms around strongly held convictions and macro investment ideas. Matt built the R2 office platform to capitalize on current and projected favorable supply/demand fundamentals in the Creative Office space.
Matt has been investing in real estate on his own account since 2001, when he purchased a 4-unit building on Chicago’s Northside. Matt learned the real estate business organically, investing his own capital, and has built R2 around people and a culture that share his hands-on, ownership ethos.
Matt funded many of his early real estate activities through a successful career as a residential broker. In 2006, Matt and his team sold 761 units in a year, ranking as the #1 Coldwell Banker agent worldwide, and sold over 2000 units in his 9-year run as a real estate broker. This record setting level of transactions provided deep insights into deal-making, human nature and timing.
In 2007, Matt began accumulating student housing in major Midwest college towns. Matt and his team purchased 17 properties through the economic crisis in a number of complex transactions, including foreclosures, loans, & multi-year entitlements. Matt’s flagship project in the student housing space was the entitlement and development of a 550-bed student housing project at Purdue University, in partnership with CA Ventures, and sold to American Campus Communities (NYSE:ACC).
In 2011, Matt exited student housing and purchased a small office building in Chicago’s West Loop where he began building R2’s vertically-integrated Creative Office platform. Today, R2 is over 50 employees and owns +6 million SF of commercial real estate acrss the Midwest.
Matt graduated from The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1998 with a degree in English, (and gave the English Convocation address in 2015). He was named to Crain’s Chicago Business 40/40 in 2014, and is a member of the Economic Club of Chicago.
