For a guy who’s built a $7.4 billion apartment building empire, developer and multifamily investor M. Patrick Carroll has been on a wild ride in recent years.
Dating back to 2019 he’s faced arrests, lawsuits, restraining orders and a messy divorce with his ex-wife Lindsey Truex.
In February 2022, Caroll moved to Miami Beach, where he paid $16.4 million for a 8,000-square-foot lakefront home for himself and his girlfriend, model Alina Baikova.
He’s since found himself in more trouble in his new city.
Just last month, The Real Deal first reported an incident captured on security video where Carroll allegedly spit in the face of a Miami restaurant manager. He denied the assault and claimed the manager attempted to provoke a confrontation.
Carroll declined to be interviewed for this story. Instead, a spokesperson provided a boilerplate statement from his attorney Duncan Levin.
“Mr. Carroll is a hugely successful self-made businessman whose company brings in millions of dollars each year,” Levin wrote. “As a well-known philanthropist, he donates millions of his hard-earned dollars to charity.”
Except for Unicef. In a Page Six interview in January, Carroll said he was taking back a $1.5 million donation to the world-known children’s charity after his bank “flagged the recipient as a fraudulent organization” and that his “philanthropic dollars would be better spent elsewhere.”
But as he faces a personal firestorm, Carroll is setting up for his biggest play yet: seeking a buyer for the Carroll Organization, his Atlanta-based company which has amassed nearly 30,000 units in the southeast and southwest U.S.
“This is something he has been flirting with for a while,” said Henry Stimler, a debt broker at Newmark. “He wants to test the market, and see if he gets the number he wants. The market will speak and tell him what the value is.”
Last year, he brokered more than $500 million in financing for Carroll, Stimler said. “Pat is not so aggressively buying right now,” Stimler said. “Before this year, he was doing a lot of acquisitions. Now with a pause in the market, exploring the sale of the whole company is a wise move.”
Stimler declined to get into the personal aspects of his client’s life.
Success aside, It’s difficult to ignore Carroll’s darker edges. His controversies paint a portrait of a savvy, self-made businessman prone to violent outbursts and confrontations.
Levin, however, sees Carroll differently.
“Having built a massive real estate empire from scratch, he now spends his time helping others in need, especially underserved children,” Levin said in his statement. “That is what he chooses to do with his time, instead of litigating old, rehashed and absurd allegations in the press.”
Empire building
His success and love of the finer things is on full display on Instagram. He has more than a million followers on the platform, where he posts about lavish parties in his new digs, dotes about his three sons and offers braggadocious glimpses of his Miami Heat courtside seats. The mogul also reposts TV interviews and self-promotional bits on his charity work, like donating sneakers to the Boys and Girls Club.
Over the past two decades, Carroll evolved from a small player flipping homes and developing small residential projects into the owner of a well-oiled multifamily conglomerate. Over its 19 years in business, the company has raised $4.4 billion in equity while buying, developing and selling more than $20 billion in real estate, according to the firm’s 2022 annual report. Carroll has also brought in some high-powered equity partners on some deals.
In 2019, his firm along with PCCP, a New York-based commercial real estate debt and equity capital firm, paid $87 million for a 400-unit apartment complex in Sunrise, Florida.
Carroll also teamed up with global investment manager PGIM, in a partnership that has acquired $2 billion worth of multifamily projects with roughly 15,000 apartments in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and South Carolina.
Last year, his firm bought 14 properties for a combined $1.3 billion, sold 23 projects for $2.2 billion and raised $343 million in equity, the firm’s 2022 annual report states. Carroll wrote in his CEO letter that his firm “demonstrated its ability to navigate challenging economic conditions.”
Unbridled
On Oct. 30, 2021, three days after a family court judge in Hillsborough County, Florida, issued a final judgment and approved a marital settlement in his divorce, Carroll sent an email that captured his animosity toward Michael Lundy, the lawyer representing his ex-wife.
“I very much appreciate this opportunity to expose you, your disgusting partner Mike Lundy and the law firm you work for,” Carroll wrote. “I have proof you used illegally recorded tapes (which is a criminal act), that Mikey is indeed in the closet, that what he was wearing was a nice scarf, that he is fat, etc.”
Carroll claimed he “lost hundreds of millions in business due to fabulous, unfounded accusations made by [Lundy]… in very public filings.”
Truex and Lundy declined comment.
The email is among several exhibits in a 2021 defamation lawsuit that Lundy filed against Carroll documenting his ongoing, sordid saga with his former spouse and her legal representatives.
Carroll’s anger boiled over to Instagram, where he raged against Lundy and his ex-wife after he filed for divorce in 2019. He posted a story with a screenshot of a magazine profile about Lundy, and wrote: “Please someone get this guy a little hormone replacement therapy. He oozes Estrogen.”
Lundy’s case is still pending.
During the divorce proceedings between 2019 and 2020, Truex obtained a temporary domestic violence stay away order against him, court records show. Carroll was required to wear an ankle monitor, which he displayed on an Instagram story. Over the image, Carroll wrote: “Mike Lundy…you can come out of the closet. You are safe.”
At the time, Carroll was twice arrested on misdemeanor charges for allegedly violating the stay away order, Tampa Police reports show. Last year, he pleaded no contest and the cases were closed, court records show.
In a counterclaim to the defamation lawsuit, Carroll alleged Truex’s legal team conspired to squeeze him for more money and “encourage the prosecution and law enforcement to file criminal charges and force Carroll’s hand.”
During a court deposition in November of last year, Carroll described Lundy as “similar to a dirty, dirty criminal, you know, shady.” Carroll believed Lundy was “involved in illegal recordings,” according to an excerpt of the deposition.
He had reason to be suspicious. In October 2021, a pseudonymous “Bill Lumpkin” from Orlando, Florida, registered the website, realmpatrickcarroll.com, according to a lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court in January.
The crude website featured “clusters of low-quality images” and a “bright red banner garishly lined the top,” according to the Daily Beast, which documented Carroll’s contentious divorce and other alleged episodes of unhinged behaviors.
But the website’s most significant content was an audio clip and a transcript detailing a 2019 recorded phone conversation between Carroll and Lindsey in which he allegedly admits to two incidents of domestic violence, court documents show.
In his lawsuit, Carroll said the recording is authentic, and that it was made without his knowledge or consent, a violation of Florida law. The defendant is unknown, the filing states.
In February, a Miami-Dade judge granted Carroll a temporary injunction ordering the website be taken down.
More recently, Truex filed a motion for contempt against Carroll last month. He responded with a motion to modify their divorce settlement. In the court filing, Carroll alleges his ex-wife is an unfit custodian for their sons, noting a video taken of her allegedly having sex in the backyard of a home, according to The Daily Beast.
Earlier this year, Carroll posted a screenshot of the alleged tryst on Instagram and wrote, “this is the white trash mother of my sons…that continues to bring me to court for $$$.” The Real Deal obtained a copy of the screenshot.
Cashing out
As chaos spirals around him, Carroll is pursuing an exit strategy from his eponymous firm. The Carroll Organization retained investment bank UBS to explore a partial or full sale of the company, according to Bisnow.
“The most likely buyer is a large REIT owner that uses third-party property management,” Newmark’s Stimler said. “They would be inheriting Carroll’s property management company that can take over their existing properties, while acquiring a company with a massive portfolio.”
Even with rising interest rates and more difficult access to capital markets today versus a couple of years ago when the multifamily sector was sizzling, landlords are selling assets “at incredible cap rates,” said Todd Cohen, a multifamily broker at Lee & Associates.
Still, the buyer pool for a company of Carroll’s size is limited, Cohen added. “There are some family offices, REITs and behemoths like Blackstone that could make a play,” Cohen said. “But it doesn’t sound like they are in the market [for big acquisitions]. There may be foreign entities that show interest.”
Indeed, Blackstone already made a big move in the multifamily market last year when it bought publicly traded Preferred Apartment Communities in a $5.8 billion deal. Levin declined to discuss Carroll’s motives to sell, but insisted that his client’s negative press has no bearing on the company.
“The reporting thus far has had absolutely no effect on Mr. Carroll’s business,” Levin said. “This wild obsession with dredging up old court papers that include false accusations regarding Mr. Carroll’s personal life is a waste of time.”