Matthew E. Hurson

It's critical to anticipate being knocked off course — and to have the workarounds ready before you need them. Sixty acres of rural land carrying a by-right subdivision plan, approved in 2014 for 176 residential lots, with a 12-year plan life set to expire on August 17, 2026. When the original developer defaulted on the loan, the lender took title by deed in lieu of foreclosure in 2023 and brought Matt in to decide whether the property was worth writing off or saving.

It was worth saving because of what the clock was about to erase: the site's zoning had since been downzoned to agricultural conservation, and the plan's age had earned it an exemption from Charles County's Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance — among the most restrictive in the state — including a scarce allocation of public school capacity. To vest the entitlements permanently, Matt worked with a civil engineer to build a schedule to record a plat and commence infrastructure construction on the required 46 lots, with plenty of schedule contingency built in, and secured a seven-figure investor commitment to fund the vesting. Then, one by one, the project got knocked off course: county review steps ran roughly double the engineer's estimates, a federal government shutdown froze a required wetlands review, the general contractor that started the infrastructure work on March 7 filed for bankruptcy protection on March 18, and a right-of-way had to be recovered from a neighboring county. The investor paused funding as the deadline closed in — until Matt and a key local land-use attorney sought and won a variance from a unanimous Planning Commission in May 2026, extending the plan's life to August 2027. The investor came back on board immediately, and the project is moving again.

Arbor College Park is a 134-unit apartment building a ten-minute walk from the University of Maryland's flagship campus, built in 1965 on a 4.25-acre site. Matt identified the opportunity in spring 2024 through a broker marketing a distressed, offshore-owned student housing portfolio on behalf of a lender, and pursued the acquisition for Cape Advisors. The deal nearly died that summer when Prince George's County introduced a rent-control ordinance and the investor group — all New Yorkers wary of rent control — withdrew from the bidding. It came back to life when the broker adjusted pricing expectations down and Matt focused on a safe-harbor exemption for buildings undergoing a qualifying renovation: an opening to buy at a steep discount. The offer dropped from $18 million to $15 million and ultimately to $10 million — this for an asset that had traded for over $24 million in 2021. The deal closed in November 2024 at $10.5 million — a fully occupied, poorly managed building known locally as College Park's "low-rent alternative."

The safe harbor existed on paper, but its governing regulations weren't published until the first quarter of 2026, and the lender required personal recourse from the investors unless the exemption came through — a live risk well into the renovation. Matt brought on a land-use attorney and a government-relations consultant, a former senior staff member to a previous elected official, to navigate the untested approval process, then cleared the building of residents to facilitate the renovation — replacing elevators, fire alarms, and sprinklers — and secured the county's written exemption from rent control in February 2026. Building in the student housing market is a bit like opening a dry-goods store before Thanksgiving — if the building ain't open by August for the fall term, might as well wait a year. Achieving vacancy had a very specific deadline for the start of renovation, and involved creating incentive programs, months of executing vacancy agreements, and — most critically — finding suitable homes for the older, lower-income residents, including placements in nearby subsidized assisted-living facilities. The renovated building — 134 units — is now a beautiful multifamily asset, ahead of proforma, roughly 70% leased and 60% occupied.

Developed a ground-up 130,000-square-foot data center in Dulles, Virginia, as an independent venture for client Marvin R. Blumberg, the property's owner. Concurrently, Matt rejoined Houston-based Hines to lead evaluation of a new global platform for data center development, in venture with Morgan Stanley Real Estate Funds — early exposure to a product type that has since become one of the most consequential and hardest-to-entitle asset classes in commercial real estate. The Dulles facility remains in service today as a mission-critical colocation data center.

Hines recruited Matt to return to New York from its Washington, DC office to co-lead the establishment of a luxury senior living platform in joint venture with Welltower, the $26 billion property REIT — developing two ground-up communities in Manhattan: Sunrise at East 56th Street and The Apsley at West 85th Street, also operated by Sunrise. Private-pay senior living is a product type with vanishingly few precedents inside New York City. Hines capped the platform at two properties, given the inability to scale single-project developments to the $1B+ deal size Hines needs. To this day, Matt considers luxury, private-pay senior living in NYC one of the greatest unexploited business opportunities he has witnessed in his forty-five-year career.

Early in the 2000s, Hines made the decision to move into suburban multifamily development. Matt was tasked with executing a broad demographic study supporting the new platform, completed in 2010 by Bethesda-based RCLCo, then assigned to lead site sourcing for the platform out of the DC office — securing control of the prized Syms site immediately adjacent to the Twinbrook Metro station in the heart of Montgomery County, Maryland. Matt then led the acquisition and entitlement effort for the 5.2-acre site in a venture with Oaktree Capital Management, and the site was sold to third-party builders. To accelerate absorption, half the site was entitled for 300+ multifamily units (now The Escher at Twinbrook), and a 65-lot townhouse community developed by Winchester Homes.

A 1.2-million-square-foot, three-building mixed-use project on Rockville Pike, steps from the White Flint Metro station — anchored by a 24-story residential tower (at delivery, the tallest building in Montgomery County), a midrise multifamily building above a Whole Foods Market at grade, and a two-story retail building framing a public plaza. Matt sourced the site and led conceptual planning and entitlement on behalf of JBG.

Completed in February 2011 for roughly $166 million, the project earned a 2010 Excellence in Construction Award from the Associated Builders and Contractors of Metropolitan Washington.

JBG had a stalled redevelopment on two 10-acre parcels at Shady Grove Road and I-270 — a vacant building and a former Kodak film-processing plant — after the City of Rockville sat on a conventional suburban plan for nine months. Matt withdrew the application and rebuilt the strategy from scratch, recruiting Andrés Duany of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. to run a design charrette on what became their test case for converting an obsolete office park into a walkable, mixed-use community.

With the commercial market nearly dead and residential on a tear, Matt's redevelopment strategy was to utilize the site's residential overlay zoning, which carried no density limit but required at least three affirmative votes from the mayor and four-member city council. The ordinance had no guidelines, goals, or criteria — just a straightforward political campaign. From the start, Rockville's mayor opposed the project and pushed the City Council to oppose it as well. Days before the council vote, and leveraging the success of the charrette, the team staged "Dessert with Duany" — an overflow community presentation that turned the neighboring King Farm civic association into an advocate. The vote came back with all four council members in favor, and the mayor alone in opposition. In place of the aging, obsolete office properties now stands the Upper Rock District: 800+ residential units in five buildings, a MOM's Organic Market, Firehouse Subs, and a coffee house.

Matt and his wife Kate are the parents of three adult sons, including Edward, who was diagnosed with autism in 1990. In the late 1990s, Matt approached a local nonprofit autism-services provider, Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children (CSAAC), about their interest in a site for a group home. CSAAC's board immediately flipped the script and asked Matt to lead the effort to build them a permanent headquarters — the organization had outgrown a surplus, deteriorated school building owned by Montgomery County. He secured a ten-acre site in Montgomery Village, a large planned community; the site had been reserved for use by the county for a public school, and years later, by then completely surrounded by dense residential development, it was declared surplus and made available for development. The entitlement challenge: the site had never been zoned for any use, meaning the entitlement started from zero — in an environment of strident civic activism and pervasive fear of the unknown, especially of people with disabilities.

What followed was the most fiercely contested land-use fight of his career: neighboring homeowners, unfamiliar with autism, organized against it through the final vote. Over roughly two years of community meetings, working alongside land-use attorney Bob Dalrymple of Linowes & Blocher — who also worked pro bono, as the parent of an autistic child himself — Matt built support among planning staff and the Planning Commission — which voted unanimously to approve the project over sustained civic opposition. From initial site control through completed construction, the 37,000-square-foot headquarters was a twelve-year effort in total; the entitlement fight itself accounted for about two of those years.