In the spring of last year, Patrick Carroll posted a video on his Instagram account that showed him on his boat clutching a shotgun, sporting a red “Make America Great Again” hat and a white towel draped over his shoulders. Carroll fired off a couple of rounds that he later claimed were blanks after police officers showed up at his house following calls from his neighbors.
Carroll deleted the video, but the clip generated a wave of controversy for the multifamily investor who sold his namesake firm to RMR Group for $80 million in 2023. Since the sale, Caroll had a lot of idle time on his hands, and the shotgun incident wasn’t the first or last time that he was in the news for the wrong reasons in recent years.
“Sitting in my pool was not good for me,” Carroll told The Real Deal publisher Amir Korangy on Thursday. “Starting in March of 2024 I went into a full blown manic attack. And frankly, there’s a lot of it [that] I don’t even remember. I look back on it and I see things that I posted or I read articles, and I cringe.”
After Miami Beach Police forced Carroll into a three-day mental health evaluation and temporarily seized his firearms, he got into more trouble a few months later in Los Angeles. He was charged with displaying a loaded firearm in public and evading a police officer in an incident that involved him being filmed by a TV news helicopter running from Los Angeles cops.
In November of last year, Florida state prosecutors dropped a felony aggravated stalking charge against Carroll in his native Tampa. A month earlier, Carroll was arrested in Wyoming on an outstanding warrant that he had allegedly violated a 15-day temporary restraining order to stay away from his ex-wife, Lindsey Truex. Prosecutors determined that phone calls he made to Truex occurred after the restraining order had expired.
In April, Carroll agreed to undergo mental health counseling for two years, in exchange for prosecutors dismissing the charges.
Carroll spoke to Korangy at The Real Deal Miami Real Estate Forum about his past controversies, finding out he had bipolar disorder that had gone undiagnosed for years, and his efforts to restore his reputation as he looks to get back in the real estate game in 2027 once a noncompete agreement with RMR expires.
“I’m going to come out of the gate in 2027,” Carroll said. “I’m pretty positive I can do $500 million to $1 billion worth of acquisitions. This is the phase I call, ‘waving my ass around.’”
Caroll’s real estate career took off in 2010 when he started to raise venture capital from institutional investors like private equity firm Carlyle, he told Korangy. “We would buy $1 billion a year,” Carroll said. “I’d go do a victory lap in New York and [tell potential new investors], ‘I’m making so much money with Carlyle, you really should partner with me.’”
Going forward, he is confident he will convince potential new investors to join him, despite his notorious past, Carroll said.
“Smart investors invest to make money, and I’m a proven moneymaker,” he said. “It was never easy for me. I was this kid from Tampa that didn’t go to college, and that had been arrested before. The good thing is I’ve never been arrested or in trouble for anything based on integrity, never anything financially related, never anything that’s affected my business.”
