TMGOC Ventures, a real estate and development private equity firm founded in 2019 as a joint venture between The Montford Group and Opterra Capital, has reached $1 billion in assets under ownership and in development.
The property that made the company reach that milestone was the forthcoming Ritz-Carlton Hotel & Residences in Savannah, GA. Construction on the104-room Ritz-Carlton, which will occupy the historic “Savannah Skyscraper,” and 20 residences is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2024, with a proposed opening date within the first quarter of 2026.
The company was founded by Glenn Alba, founder/CEO, Opterra Capital, and Sunju Patel, founder/CEO, The Montford Group, who serve as managing partners.
The company was founded by Glenn Alba (standing) and Sunju Patel.
“We’ve been operating loosely as TMGOC Ventures for a couple of years before we made the more formal announcement last year when we brought the two companies together,” said Alba, who, before founding Opterra, spent 20 years at The Blackstone Group.
The Charleston, SC-based Montford and Boca Raton, FL-based Opterra were both founded in 2017, “but we’ve been operating as almost a single unit for a significant amount of that time and investing in all the deals together,” noted Alba, who added that the two leaders complement each other, with Patel coming from a “highly entrepreneurial background,” while he himself has “highly institutional experience.”
The company’s billion-dollar portfolio includes branded and soft-brand hotels in the Southeastern U.S. When asked how the company grew so quickly, Patel said it was “the perfect combination of magic and logic,” adding, “I would say Glenn is more logical and I’m the magic guy.”
He continued, “But more importantly, we have an incredible team, and we always say that real estate is about relationships and location. Fortunately, we had incredible relationships in the hospitality industry with brokers, lenders, debt partners, equity partners, etc., and we also were geographically placed in such an amazing region, especially post-COVID.”
Alba offered that he and Patel “planted the seeds for a lot of the growth when we first met in 2017 and 2018, whether that was through acquiring some of the land sites that we’re going vertical on or securing those land sites by getting through entitlements that can take a long time, especially in the higher-barrier-to-entry markets that we’re targeting,”
The company’s first deal was the Moxy Charleston Downtown. “I think we first shook hands with a lender in March 2020, and two days later COVID-19 started to break and the deal fell apart,” Patel recalled. “A year later, we found a lender—Krystal England with Canyon Partners Real Estate—and the deal was soon completed.”
The deal for the Moxy Charleston Downtown was the company’s first.
In June of this year, England was officially announced as TMGOC Ventures’ first chief investment officer (CIO) based in Colorado.
“Our team is building on one success after another,” said England, who was managing director at Canyon Partners. “We’re lucky to have the team and the relationships out in the market that we do, but also the relationships with our investors are willing continue to invest with us based on the success that we’ve brought to them in the past.”
England also brought new rescue capital platform to the company, where she can leverage her expertise in finance.
“There’s absolutely a need for rescue capital or gap financing opportunities, and that’s something that I bring into the firm with my prior expertise with Canyon,” she said. “We can do loan paydowns and can finance property improvement plans (PIPs). We can also help with acquisition financing, and we envision being able to provide construction completion capital in limited scenarios.”
With the two joint-venture companies based in the Southeast, it was only fitting that it was in that region where TMGOC portfolio took shape.
“There was a belief that there was going to be an economic migration from higher-cost and colder-weather states into the Southeast and the onset of the pandemic turbocharged those,” said Alba. “There were some nervous times during COVID, but we were continuing to invest in our pre-development pipeline and our people. We were able to exit out of that pandemic phase ready and spurred on for this great growth that we’ve seen.”
Krystal England TMGOC Ventures
The company’s portfolio is brand agnostic and runs the gamut of hotel segments. In October of last year, TMGOC closed on a three-hotel acquisition of the Courtyard Myrtle Beach Broadway in South Carolina, and the Hilton Garden Inn Roanoke Rapids and Courtyard Charlotte Airport in North Carolina. It has also acquired several hotels in Florida, including the Holiday Inn Boca Raton North.
The development pipeline is robust with 11 projects including a Moxy hotel under construction in Uptown Charlotte, which will feature a Starbucks that the company owns and operates; a Tapestry Collection by Hilton property and a 233-unit multifamily, mixed-use development in Macon, GA; and a 150-key Autograph Collection hotel and 20 residences in Charleston.
Another property the company is developing is the 191-room Thompson Charleston, which, according to Alba, will be the “first flat-iron-shaped, ground-up construction hotel in the U.S. in many years.” The nine-story hotel, a rarity in the city, will feature 5,000 sq. ft. of event space and a rooftop pool and bar.
With England in Colorado and another office in Oakland, CA, the company is primed for expansion to the Western U.S. Already, the company has earmarked Arizona, Colorado and Utah as markets to grow in the region.
“We’re trying to be opportunistic in finding the right opportunities,” said Alba. “The transaction market is a little bit more frozen, but we’ll continue to keep searching.”
England added that there’s no “hard and fast requirement for any geography or key count. I think we all do a good job of collectively getting our arms around an opportunity and understanding whether one exists and what it is, and we’ll continue that philosophy. Just having a presence out here allows us to get to the asset more quickly and have a reason to expand the portfolio out west.”
Patel summed up the company’s expansion philosophy. “We don’t have to do a deal to pay our bills,” he said. “So it allows us to jump on an opportunity when we need to, or just sit back and watch the show until we feel like something has to happen. We’re in a privileged position right now as a company. In terms of future growth, they always say to dream bigger, and our dreams are larger than anything we could imagine.”
