PRP Real Assets adds Cole Cook for multifamily push

PRP Real Assets has hired Cole Cook as director of multifamily acquisitions, bringing in a dealmaker with more than nine years of apartment investment experience and involvement in more than $1 billion of multifamily transactions, IREI reported. Cook, who will be based in New York and focus on sourcing and executing investments as the firm grows its national multifamily platform, arrives two days after PRP consolidated fundraising, investor relations, and marketing under Cherkes-Bishko as head of capital formation.

That mandate ties how PRP raises capital to how it tells its story to institutional investors. Two appointments in the same week put the firm's capital-raising and deal-sourcing functions on parallel tracks, and their timing suggests PRP is treating them as one effort rather than separate ones.

Cook arrives from Gindi Equities, where as vice president of acquisitions and asset management he oversaw multifamily investments across the Midwest and Southeast. Previously he was an associate at Ashcroft Capital focused on Sunbelt acquisitions, and he graduated with honors in finance from Ohio State.

Those roles gave him a view across the apartment market that few single-region buyers get. Ashcroft concentrated on Sunbelt growth markets that have drawn a large share of institutional capital, while Gindi worked the Midwest and Southeast, where private buyers face different pricing dynamics. PRP's national platform gets a buyer with transaction experience in both growth and mature markets.

That breadth matters because apartment capital is concentrating at record scale even as cap rates reset upward, as this publication has argued, and the next repricing is likely to hit lease-up assets hardest. Cook's background positions PRP to source deals at a moment when sourcing is the scarce skill that separates active buyers from bystanders.

Investors will be watching whether PRP pairs these appointments with a dedicated multifamily vehicle, the move that would reveal how quickly the firm plans to put its new capital-formation and acquisitions hires to work.