Matt Wexler

Principal at Excel Group

Speaker

Matt Wexler is a Principal on the Investments team at Excel Group and leads Excel Group’s structured capital strategy, which builds on Excel’s institutional hospitality investment platform. He also oversees the firm’s capital markets execution and acquisition opportunities. Excel Group is a private equity firm focused on investing in and developing premium-branded limited-service hotels, or loans collateralized by hotels.

Matt has over 22 years of experience in the hospitality investment space, as an entrepreneur and fund manager consultant and in prior positions at leading commercial real estate investment firms. Matt brings a combination of strong training in institutional investment management and success in hospitality investments as a developer, distressed purchasers and asset manager overseeing both flagged hotels and independents. Matt’s deep hospitality asset management expertise ranges from evaluating and overseeing large-scale renovations of properties going through brand changes and more modest change-of-control property improvement plans to supervising property tax appeals and digital marketing campaigns.

Prior to joining Excel Group, Matt founded Cascadilla Partners in 2021, a boutique investment firm, consultancy and asset manager focused solely on debt and equity investments in hotels. Matt, in partnership and conjunction with a Charlotte-based fund, executed over $100 Million in non-performing and sub-performing loans, all backed by limited and select-service hotels, and lender-driven short sales. He negotiated a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure with a borrower on one and successfully led loan payoffs, at par, on several others.

In 2010, Matt co-founded Foxhall Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based hospitality-focused commercial development and investment firm, where he was responsible for the development and asset management of its hospitality portfolio and led multiple flag and independent third party manager selection processes. Matt oversaw third party hotel, food & beverage, parking and fitness management companies and collaborated on an ongoing basis with these groups, independently and holistically, to create programs and structure incentives to maximize bottom-line property net operating income. Matt evaluated and executed ongoing capital improvements and property investments, such as HVAC and other energy efficiency upgrades as well as amenities including meeting space repositionings and rooftop spaces. Among other projects at Foxhall, Matt successfully completed the $15 Million renovation of the 198-key Kimpton Carlyle Hotel Dupont Circle, adding 30 new rooms and nearly 5,000 square feet of new meeting and dining space without expanding the existing building.

Previously, Matt was Vice President of Investments at the Bethesda, MD office of CIM Group and a Senior Investment Analyst for The JBG Companies (now JBG Smith), where he started his career in commercial real estate. At CIM and JBG, Matt led the acquisition and due diligence efforts of multiple hotels, and loans secured by hotel properties, totaling over 1,800 keys in several key domestic markets. Matt was also responsible for the asset management of a 415-room hotel undergoing a property improvement plan with a major international flag.

Matt is a member of the Cornell Hotel Society and the Urban Land Institute, which has invited him to speak at its fall annual meeting, its capital markets interchange and panels on neighborhood investment strategies and leveraging digital platforms. Matt holds a B.A., graduating Magna Cum Laude and with distinction, from Cornell University and an M.B.A. in Real Estate and Finance from the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.