Coastal Investment Company

Coastal Investment Company

Greg Meerbaum founded Coastal Investment Company in Winter Park, Florida, in 2014 alongside CFO Tyler Bloechinger and COO Keith Ahrens, who joined the leadership team in 2017. The firm emerged from Meerbaum's effort to institutionalize the deal-by-deal real estate and private-business investments he was already sharing with family and friends. Headquartered north of Orlando with an additional office in Delray Beach, Coastal today positions its strategies around direct placements in demand-driven property types and early- to mid-stage operating companies. Coastal's strategy spans two main verticals. On the real estate side, the firm commits to multifamily, self-storage, build-for-rent, boat-and-RV storage, last-mile industrial, essential retail, gas stations, hospitality, assisted living, and distressed assets, with disclosed project sites across Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and Colorado. Live project cards on its site include Madison LoSo — a 364-unit multifamily development in Charlotte — and a 332-unit build-for-rent community in Fort Worth with Empire Group. The firm's venture capital and growth equity arm, Coastal Ventures, targets real estate development, manufacturing, software, technology, healthcare, data storage, and energy and renewables, functioning as a generalist growth capital provider. Coastal reports an aggregate asset value of over $4.8 billion across 141 assets, while explicitly stating on its website that this figure does not represent AUM and that the firm and its partners are not the sole equity owners of the portfolio. The executive team structure is unusually tall for a firm of its stated scale, listing a CEO, CFO, COO, Chief Acquisitions Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Construction Officer, and a Director of Technology. An in-house construction arm, Benco Commercial, supplies estimating and project management services. Investor relations leadership includes a VP of Investor Relations and a dedicated LATAM coverage lead, reflecting a capital-raising effort that extends beyond domestic retail. What distinguishes Coastal is its architecture as a sponsored-access platform rather than a discretionary fund manager. The firm conducts extensive third-party due diligence — background checks on sponsors and developers, financial modeling, stress testing, and independent legal opinions — then packages individual single-asset and multi-asset opportunities for accredited investors. This creates a private-syndication model in which the firm's economics are tied to placement and asset management rather than purely to carried interest in a commingled vehicle.