Ex-Goldman CFO Returns to Wall Street Atop $55 Billion Housing Giant

(Bloomberg) -- Stephen Scherr, the former chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is seeking a Wall Street comeback by joining the leadership of one of the biggest investors in US housing.

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Scherr starts this week as co-president at Pretium, a major landlord of US single-family homes founded by his former Goldman colleague Don Mullen. The new hire will share his post atop the $55 billion investment firm with another heavyweight Mullen recruited last year: former Morgan Stanley CFO Jon Pruzan.

“The firm has grown extremely fast. I need to be in a position that I have people around me that, if I get hit by a bus, can run the place,” Mullen, 66, said in an interview. “That doesn’t mean that, if I drop dead, they come out of a glass case to run the place. There’s a lot to do now.”

That includes expanding the firm.

“Bringing folks like that on board is going to put us in a position to be able to grow in a reasoned and mature way,” he said. “We are still a tween in our growth path.”

Scherr, 60, spent most of his career at Goldman, including his last three years as finance chief, until 2021. The banker then ran car-rental company Hertz Global Holdings Inc. before stepping down from that role in March as the company teetered from its mistimed bet on electric vehicles.

In joining Pretium, he returns to the familiar turf of finance, this time focusing on a residential real estate market that’s being reshaped by giants. Mullen made a shrewd bet in the aftermath of the US foreclosure crisis, snapping up homes at depressed prices as he walked neighborhoods in California and Arizona.

He has since expanded Pretium, amassing a portfolio of almost 100,000 rental homes and plowing deeper into more corners of real estate. That includes a nascent bet on apartment buildings. For investors, the multifamily market has presented opportunities, as some landlords and their lenders fret over a wave of loan maturities, and as some parts of the country work through a supply glut. Pretium is also in the business of originating and servicing home loans and is looking to bulk up in real estate debt.

Pretium has grown at a moment of deep public frustration over the lack of affordable housing. That’s turned attention — and scorn — toward Wall Street players. Both Republican and Democratic leaders have argued institutional investors are making it tougher for people to buy their first homes.