Things were not good for multifamily investor Patrick Carroll — that much the industry knew.
His volatility had been so public. He’d fired guns from his boat and reamed out employees at car dealerships and restaurants. Then, two days before the Fourth of July in 2024, a Los Angeles news chopper caught him on camera fleeing from the police. After years of unstable behavior, this was his first clear step into the abyss. Footage from the chase shows a phalanx of officers swarming a tall man in an unbuttoned light-colored shirt and dark slacks. The cops had pulled him over and pursued him down an embankment near a Los Angeles highway. Carroll pretended to surrender, but then just took off.
When they finally caught him, police officers reportedly found two discarded weapons, a machete and a gun.
Carroll has been one of the country’s most successful multifamily syndicators since the 2010s. Self-made, not only did he lack family wealth, but he hadn’t even gone to college. His path had not been smooth: There were arrests, lawsuits, restraining orders and a messy divorce, and in retrospect, the particulars of these cases anticipated what happened later. But by buying into the Sun Belt boom early, he’d managed to do $9 billion in transactions by age 40.
In 2023, he seemed to reach an apex, selling his Atlanta-based namesake firm, Carroll Organization, to RMR Group for $80 million.
On the other side of the sale lay a bleak period.
“Being in retirement, having nothing to do, sitting in my pool in Miami was not good for me,” Carroll said in an interview with The Real Deal publisher Amir Korangy at the 2025 Miami Real Estate Forum last month. Since the sale to RMR, he’s been adhering to a non-compete agreement, which expires on Jan. 1, 2027. It forced him to the sidelines in business. But his mind was going a million miles an hour, he said.
In March of 2024, just nine months after the RMR deal, he “went into a full-blown manic attack,” he said. “And frankly, there’s a lot of it that I don’t remember.” It turned out to be bipolar disorder, which had not yet been diagnosed.
“It’s like a grandiosity that you have,” Carroll said. “Everybody else around you notices it, but going through it, you don’t notice your poor judgment. I didn’t give a sh*t.” Bizarre episodes followed, and his troubles made headlines for months.
By that July, he was fleeing the Los Angeles police, who eventually arrested Carroll and charged him with three felonies: carrying a loaded firearm in public; fleeing a police vehicle and driving against traffic; and a disregard for safety by eluding an officer.
But Carroll, now 46, said he is back on track. His candor in front of thousands was his way of normalizing mental health struggles, he said, making them okay to talk about. But he also wanted to underscore his newfound equanimity, to tell the audience that he was better and to position himself for a return to the industry when the non-compete expires. Carroll said that he still owns a stake in 20,000 apartment units.
In April, he entered a prosecution diversion program by agreeing to undergo mental health counseling for two years.
The rise of a multifamily mogul
Carroll grew up in Tampa, from “not a lot of money,” he said. He started flipping homes in the Southeast U.S. when he moved to Atlanta after graduating from high school. He developed and sold a 150-unit apartment project in Atlanta when he was 27, using the profits to buy three property management companies that oversaw 22,000 apartment units.
He began a sharper ascent in 2010, when he started raising capital from such institutional investors as Carlyle Group. “It was a big deal for me to get joint venture capital” back then, he said.
Carroll Organization became a multifamily sponsor that partnered with institutional investors to buy properties in the Sun Belt. The company also managed the properties in-house. In 2022, the year before Carroll sold the company, Carroll Organization acquired 14 multifamily projects with 5,000 units for a total purchase price of $1.3 billion, and sold 23 properties with nearly 8,500 apartments for a total sale price of $2.2 billion, according to the firm’s annual report.
TRD first picked up on him in 2015, when he signed two mortgages totaling $84 million for a $112 million purchase of the 812-unit Resort at Laguna Lakes in West Palm Beach.
“The Sun Belt market welcomes guys like me with open arms,” he said at the Forum.
At the time, multifamily real estate was still dominated by mom-and-pop operators, and the institutionalization of the sector was just beginning.
“Everybody else around you notices it, but going through it, you don’t notice your poor judgment. I didn’t give a sh*t.”
Carroll saw the trend early and positioned himself at the forefront, building a platform that would eventually buy and sell more than 90,000 units across the region, generating average investment returns of 25 percent over a three-and-a-half-year hold period, he said.
“Everybody thought the Sun Belt was red neck,” he said. Pre-Covid, when he’d go up to New York, he remembered, “I’d be wearing a Kiton suit, and [because of the type of properties I was investing in] they thought I was a red neck in a pickup truck.”
But when pandemic shifts sent people packing from New York and California to some of the locations where his portfolio was — Texas, Florida and the Carolinas — Carroll spied the deadline for the early-bird special.
“I was screaming at my investors, ‘We have to sell!’” he said. “It wasn’t because I thought things were going to fall off a cliff. I just said, things can’t get much better, so why not take profits?”
The ability to spot market inflection points earned him a reputation as a visionary, even as his brash style alienated some in the industry.
“We would buy a 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.’”
Crashing out
Like the rest of the world, Carroll signed up for Instagram sometime in the late 2010s. Although the platform isn’t to blame for his problems, it did allow others to see them.
Beginning in 2023, shortly before selling his company, Carroll would occasionally go on rampages, sometimes documenting the incidents himself. Last spring, he filmed and posted videos of himself berating customer service employees at a Bentley car dealership and an Apple store. Carroll also posted inflammatory comments about other prominent Miamians on social media, threatened attorneys and engaged in public confrontations that contradicted his image of a disciplined dealmaker.
In the months around his arrest in Los Angeles, Carroll found himself in trouble with law enforcement in other jurisdictions.
In March of last year, Carroll posted a video on his account that showed him on his boat docked in his backyard. He clutched a shotgun, sported a red “Make America Great Again” hat and a white towel draped over his shoulders. From the boat’s bow, Carroll fired off a couple of rounds that he later claimed were blanks when police officers showed up at his house after neighbors called the authorities.
Days later, Miami Beach Police obtained a court order forcing Carroll to undergo a three-day involuntary psychiatric evaluation. Officers also confiscated his firearms during his hospital stay. Following his release, Carroll told TRD at the time that doctors gave him a clean bill of health.
Eight months later, cops arrested Carroll in Wyoming on an outstanding warrant for felony aggravated stalking because he had allegedly violated a 15-day temporary restraining order to stay away from his ex-wife, Lindsey Truex. In November, a Florida prosecutor dropped the charge after determining that Carroll had called Truex after the restraining order had expired.
Carroll also recently privately settled three civil lawsuits against him in Miami-Dade County Circuit Court and Los Angeles Superior Court. The two cases in Miami involved a restaurant manager, Miguelangel Weill, and a videographer, Roberto Gatica. Weill alleged that Carroll defamed him by falsely accusing him of extortion via a spokesperson. Carroll got into a confrontation with Weill at a Wynwood sushi spot in 2023. The incident allegedly ended with Carroll spitting at Weill.
Gatica sued Carroll for breach of contract and civil battery tied to a video assignment in March 2024 that turned ugly. Carroll allegedly contracted Gatica through an agency to shoot video content for the mogul’s Instagram account. Gatica alleged that Carroll verbally insulted him, including calling him a “fat motherf*cker,” and pushed him when he decided to leave and quit the assignment.
The Los Angeles lawsuit was filed by two ex-body guards who accused Carroll of civil assault, battery, false imprisonment, wrongful termination and creating a hostile work environment.
“I wish I’d never heard of Instagram and put all that out,” Carroll admitted at the Forum. “I look back on it and I see things that I posted, or I read articles, and I cringe.”
Road to redemption
Today, Carroll uses his Instagram account, which has 1.1 million followers, to repair his image and be an outspoken advocate for mental health awareness. Flashy videos of him shopping for designer goods in Miami’s Design District have been replaced with clips of Carroll sharing his knowledge on real estate and other investments. He still posts images and clips of him with his three sons and engaging in his favorite philanthropic endeavor, handing out free sneakers to children at the Boys and Girls Club.
“If I just sat back, and the last thing you ever read about me was the stuff that was in Page Six and other stuff, nobody would know any different,” Carroll said. “So I’m on Instagram every day. I’m showing people, you know, I’m changed.”
Carroll’s plan for 2027 is ambitious. He intends to build a new investment platform, hiring former Blackstone executives and other top talent to run the day-to-day operations while he focuses on strategy and capital raising. “I want Carroll 2.0 to be the Navy Seals of what it was before,” he said.
Carroll remains confident that institutional investors will see past his controversies. “Smart investors invest to make money, and I’m a proven money maker,” he said.
“I’ve never been arrested or in trouble for anything based on integrity, never anything financially related and never anything that’s affected my business. Mine were self-inflicted wounds. I think people are going to [say], “He went through a rough period of time, but he got the best help he could.’”
As Carroll prepares for his next chapter, he’s determined to prove that redemption is possible. “I’m going to come out of the gate in 2027,” he 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.’”
