Age: 39
BS history and politics ’01
Co-founder, Post Brothers Apartments
Matthew Pestronk and his $1 billion private apartment firm Post Brothers Apartments are about to become major landlords in University City, bringing him back to his alma mater where his real estate career began.
When the siblings who own real estate firm Post Brothers Apartments announced in 2015 that they were buying the 13-story apartment building Garden Court Plaza at 47th and Pine and investing $250 million in University City housing with the goal of keeping recent grads in the neighborhood, it wasn’t just a Philadelphia business making a firm step into the neighborhood. It was a recent grad, who used his co-op at Drexel as the launching point for his career, coming home.
“We were young guys, and people were amazed by our brashness and incredulous as to whether our plans would work,” recalls Matthew Pestronk (BS history and politics ’01), who founded Post Brothers Apartments with his brother in 2007. “After a while, people stopped telling me ‘you’re crazy.’”
The Alexandria, Virginia, native chose Drexel both because of its location in Philadelphia and because he wanted to wrestle. “I committed the day after my recruiting trip because I liked it so much,” he says.
He readily admits that he wasn’t the best wrestler on the team (“I was primarily a backup,” he says, wrestling in the 174-pound weight class) in part because he spent much of his time at Drexel enjoying other things the city and the school had to offer, from being president of Sigma Pi to his classes and his co-op, where he worked for Jon Sarkisian, an executive vice president for global real estate behemoth CBRE-Insignia.
“I just liked it,” he says about real estate. “I liked the fact that it was very entrepreneurial and on the fly and creative and analytical.”
He zeroed in on the financial side of the process — specifically, raising funds — and after graduating worked in office leasing and real estate acquisition before becoming managing director of the Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group, where he was the youngest professional in the firm’s history to hold that title.
There, he saved up money that he would eventually pour into Post Brothers Apartments.
“We wanted to do the kinds of projects that no one had done before, at a higher quality than anyone else was doing,” he says, with the goal to “produce higher returns than anyone else.”
Just 10 years after its founding, the firm owns more than $1 billion in real estate, including seven buildings in University City. It is a fully vertical integrated company, which Pestronk said is not common: They handle the buying and management of properties from start to finish, including financing, construction management, redevelopment and then management. They currently manage over 3,000 apartments and more than 200,000 square feet of commercial real estate across 20 buildings. In 2013, Philadelphia Magazine named them in its “Best of” list.
For this success, Pestronk gives plenty of credit to Drexel, especially his time working at CBRE-Insignia. “It can’t be understated the advantage you can get in your career if you get a really good co-op,” he says.
— Jen Miller