Westlight Capital reports $750 million in multifamily AUM ten months after founding

Ten months after Westlight Capital was formed, the West Palm Beach multifamily manager reports $750 million in assets under management, per Commercial Observer's interview with founder and managing partner Doug Faron. That works out to about $75 million a month for a firm that did not exist a year ago.

A firm that young is selling its founder's record, and Faron's is the kind that raises money: ten years at CIM Group as a managing director leading East Coast equity investments, preceded by mergers and acquisitions at Deutsche Bank and a stretch at LNK Partners, a private equity fund focused on consumer businesses. He also ran Shoreham Capital, a build-to-rent venture he started earlier this decade and one of two firms the interview credits him with founding, and over 15 years has overseen $10 billion of real estate investments and developments. The interview, conducted late this summer and edited for length and clarity, covers the two firms, the national apartment market, his home state of Florida, and what he has learned about relationships in fundraising.

The route in was small-scale: Faron started a real estate club at Brown University, worked in M&A on Wall Street, then bought a small multifamily building in bankruptcy in New York and converted a commercial building into a hotel on nights and weekends alongside his day job. Northwestern for business school followed, and an internship at CIM took him to Los Angeles; he joined the firm after graduating and stayed a decade.

CIM, where Faron honed his capital markets experience, is still an apartment buyer: PWD reported this month on the purchase of a 134-unit building in White Plains, weeks after an office disposition, and the same reporting has argued the 2028-29 supply gap is where apartment equity keeps forming. The pricing a new manager prices into is not uniform, though; Fortress bought San Francisco multifamily at roughly half of pre-COVID pricing, per the firm's real estate equity head.

Ten months to $750 million fits that story of apartment equity forming while pricing settles on rent rolls and job bases. But the interview does not break out how much of the money is committed versus deployed, which markets Westlight has targeted, or a strategy beyond a multifamily specialization, so it remains open whether the firm is underwriting the supply gap or today's cash flow. Those are the numbers that would show what the ten-month run has bought.