Building Billion-Dollar Real Estate Deals With Scott McKibben of Matterhorn Venture Partners

Scott McKibben is the CEO and Co-founder of Matterhorn Venture Partners, a Chicago-based firm that specializes in acquiring, developing, and managing value-added industrial real estate across the US. With a career spanning over 30 years, Scott has overseen more than $10.6 billion in transactions and has developed and acquired more than 80 million square feet of industrial and office properties — making a significant impact on the commercial real estate industry. A former NCAA Division I tennis player at DePaul University and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Scott brings a competitive and disciplined approach to deal-making and team building.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:57] How Scott McKibben launched Matterhorn Venture Partners overnight with a MVP vision
• [05:57] Why value-added industrial real estate creates strong investment margins
• [07:12] The challenges and strategies of ground-up vs. existing builds
• [10:53] Why persistence is critical to long-term success in real estate
• [12:14] How a competitive sports mindset fuels winning deal strategies
• [17:19] Why Scott left a thriving firm to build his own company
• [20:32] How to attract and partner with top real estate talent
• [29:24] The biggest mistake new real estate dealmakers make

In this episode…

Many real estate professionals face the challenge of scaling profitably while adapting to unpredictable market cycles. With rising interest rates, fierce competition, and shifting project economics, building a resilient investment firm requires more than capital — it demands vision, adaptability, and the ability to attract top-tier talent. How can today’s dealmakers structure firms that weather downturns and still deliver strong returns?

Scott McKibben, a seasoned commercial real estate executive, shares how he launched his firm with a lean, MVP-style approach — assembling a team of trusted colleagues and offering shared ownership to create true alignment. With over $10 billion in transactions and 80 million square feet of industrial and office projects under his belt, Scott reflects on lessons from both legacy deals and new ventures. He explains why backing local partners as 50-50 co-owners leads to entrepreneurial agility, how persistence and adaptability helped him navigate projects like the Citadel Center pivot, and why securing equity before chasing deals is a discipline he swears by.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Scott McKibben, Co-founder and CEO of Matterhorn Venture Partners, about building high-impact real estate ventures. Scott shares his journey from leadership at Brennan Investment Group to launching MVP, strategies for recruiting top talent, and the importance of transparency and trust with investors. He also dives into the mindset that fuels long-term success, the role of relationships in sourcing deals, and how sports taught him the grit and discipline needed to thrive in real estate.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Scott McKibben on LinkedIn
• Matterhorn Venture Partners
• Brennan Investment Group
• Michael Brennan on LinkedIn

Special Mentions:

• Matt Kay on LinkedIn
• Tina Ramos on LinkedIn
• Gary Nussbaum on LinkedIn
• Sean McKibben on LinkedIn
• Becky Zitella on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “[Athlete Entrepreneur Series] NFL Player’s Winning Formula for Business Success With Desmond Clark” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How One of the Largest Real Estate Communities was Built? with Joshua Dorkin Founder of BiggerPockets.com” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “EO Tulsa | Real Estate Investment With Mat Zalk of Keyrenter Property Management” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top SaaS & Agency Series] Real Estate Marketing With Automated Ad Platforms With Stephen Whiting” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “A real estate deal is just a series of obstacles on the way to 
• a common goal — you have to be persistent through the struggles.”
• “I really wanted to get back to being a deal junkie. I knew I wanted to get back to touching deals.”
• “Not everyone gets to have this opportunity to kind of do it again, but I get to do it in a different fashion.”
• “You need to go into a deal bringing your equity to the table — too many people tie up deals without having their equity in-hand.”
• “By extending myself whenever I was asked, it’s come back and I’ve been rewarded from it — planting seeds throughout my entire career.”

Action steps:

1. Build persistence and resilience: Developing a mindset that embraces setbacks helps you navigate the unpredictable nature of real estate deals and see them through.
2. Focus on genuine relationships: Helping others and nurturing authentic connections creates long-term opportunities and strengthens your network.
3. Communicate proactively with stakeholders: Keeping investors and partners informed builds trust and ensures alignment through challenges.
4. Prepare resources before pursuing deals: Securing capital and financing upfront allows you to act quickly and credibly in competitive markets.
5. Cultivate ownership and collaboration: Offering equity and shared stakes attracts top talent and drives team-wide commitment without traditional structures.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. I’m the founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Scott McKibben.

You can check him out at MatterhornVP.com. They’re Matterhorn Venture Partners. We’re going to go deep into what he does and his interesting career. And Scott, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. 

We met through Desmond Clark. That was a great episode of the podcast. Thank you, Des. He has a storied career in the NFL and now runs Bear Down Logistics. And so we talked about a lot of interesting lessons, stories, and topics. Check that out. Since this is in the real estate space, you know, I had on Joshua Dorkin and we talked about how one of the largest real estate communities was built. He started Bigger Pockets. And also Mat Zalk of Key Rental Property Management and the interesting stuff they do in and help people with real estate investment. And then Stephen Whiting, we talked about real estate marketing with automated app platform. So that and more on InspiredInsider.com. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. So we do everything from the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution and production. Number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting, so we make gifting and staying top of mind for your clients, partners, prospects, even staff. Simple. Easy. Affordable. All you have to do is give us a list of your people. We’ll do everything else right. 

And so for me. So, Scott, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it stress free for companies to build amazing relationships. And over the past 15 years, I found no better way than one profiling the people and companies I admire on the podcast, and two, sending them sweet treats in the mail to enjoy. So go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. 

I’m super excited to introduce Scott McKibben, he is co-founder and CEO of Matterhorn Venture Partners. And before Matterhorn Venture Partners, Scott was co-founder and CIO and managing principal at Brennan Investment Group. He oversaw acquisition, development and sale of industrial properties across the US, totaling nearly $8 billion in transactions and nearly 8,000,000ft² in over 30 states. That’s a lot.

Scott McKibben: 03:04

80 million, I think.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:04

Actually 80, 80 million, right? 80,000,000ft² in over 30 states. He’s also the co-founder and CEO of Madison Partners Realty, which purchased and managed over 5,000,000ft² of office and industrial space in Chicago and Milwaukee. And prior to that, Scott is the VP of acquisitions at Prime Group Realty Trust, was responsible for the acquisition development of several million square feet of principally office buildings in the Midwest. And if you look at Scott, your career, he’s acquired or developed over $10.8 billion worth of, you know, industrial and office properties. He also hails from where I did, which is University of Wisconsin. He’s a badger as well. So Scott, thanks for joining me.

Scott McKibben: 03:50

Thank you. I appreciate this Dr. Jeremy and I look forward to sharing some time with you right now.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:57

Let’s start off with Matterhorn Venture Partners and talk about what you do and anyone who’s watching. I’m going to pull up their site. So if you’re watching or listening to the audio there is a video piece. So talk about I guess we call it MVP.

Scott McKibben: 04:14

MVP yeah. So we had that acronym. It’s kind of funny as I started, the company left Brent Investment Group on April 17th in 2024, and I started Matterhorn Venture Partners April 18th, 2024. So a day later I didn’t lose any time. And in fact, we were named Matterhorn Investment Partners for about 12 hours.

And then my wife woke me up in the middle of the night and said, you know what? Matterhorn Venture Partners would be better because then you’d have MVP as your acronym. And that was a pretty good idea. So for one day, we were Matterhorn Investment Partners and since then we’ve been Matterhorn Venture Partners and yeah.

And I partnered with a couple people that I worked with in the past or I respected and wanted to, including Matt Kay, who was with me right there, pictured alongside me. And he’s been with me at Brennan for about 11 years and then joined, you know, I brought him along, Tina Ramos, she was at PCP for many years and also the CIO of Missner Group, and she was someone I was in AP form with for many years and, and really wanted to work with her. And then Gary Nussbaum was at CBRE until last October, and I brought him over. And my son is an analyst with us and an associate that’s working on deals, and he had worked at CBRE as well, and Clear Height Properties after that for a little bit. And then Becky is, we have a fractional CFO that is able to kind of just handle the amount of accounting work that we have now.

It’s growing and eventually we’ll have probably more needs for that. But that’s kind of the team we have right now. and then we kind of partner with a lot of different people throughout the United States on different ventures.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:55

What does the MVP do?

Scott McKibben: 05:57

So we are in primarily industrial real estate. You know, that’s where I’ve kind of sunk my teeth in over the last 15 years. And so we buy, build, mostly buy existing, but we also build some we’re building in Vegas with a group, but we’re buying throughout the United States. Industrial value added industrial real estate. And what that means is we’re buying things that we think there’s some margin between what we buy it for and what we sell it for ultimately. Usually we’re holding this property for 3 to 5 years, and we’ll do it anywhere in the United States.

And we’re doing something to usually add value, whether it’s retaining it, do some capital improvement works to the buildings, maybe aggregate a portfolio of smaller deals to create a larger portfolio that would aggregate and be more interesting to institutions, and they’ll pay a little more for it. So that’s really what we do. We’re pretty agnostic towards what type of deal we’ll do. We’ll do small ones. We’ll do large ones. We’ll do ones in between. And we’re aggregating portfolios in Florida and Texas, Atlanta and Chicago right now with different groups.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:07

Do you ever build from scratch or they’re existing infrastructure always?

Scott McKibben: 07:12

I have built from scratch. You know, most of my career, I haven’t done that. I would say the majority of what I’ve done, I’d say 80% has probably been buying existing, but maybe 20%. And there was a time at Brennan where I think at one point we had 21 active development deals going on throughout several states, probably a dozen states at that time. And so, you know, and right now I just have a land development site in Kenosha, 100 acres that were splitting off and selling to different multifamily and residential developers.

That’s not normally what I do, but that made a lot of sense. And then we have some land by Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas that we’re looking at developing, and we have one site in Chicago that will have some additional land, and we’ll tear down an office building and potentially put up an industrial building there as well, in an existing park of industrial buildings.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:09

You know, for some reason, Scott, real estate stuff stresses me out because there’s so many moving pieces and logistics to it to give people a sense of some of the deals. Maybe we could talk through a couple examples. We were talking before we hit record about the Citadel Center. Talk about that.

Scott McKibben: 08:30

Yeah, that was one of my early deals. So when I worked for a company called Prime Group Realty Trust and Mike Reschke, who had co-founded or he created that company for publicly traded companies he created, and Mike is now doing the Google one, the old state of Illinois building with Quentin Primo. And they’re doing that now. But Mike, you know, is definitely a prolific developer and a big proponent of the city of Chicago. 

And one of the sites that we had, I was buying some downtown office buildings, and we had a site that we controlled that primarily trust at the time. And then Paul Beitler came in as a partner. And at one point there was a, you know, we were working with Bank one to make that their headquarters, their Columbus, Ohio based bank ultimately were bought by Chase. But while we were negotiating, there was a big billboard around the site.

I remember that, and it said, you know, we were trying to be secretive about the bank because they were going to relocate from Columbus. And I remember Paul Beitler comes into my office one day and he goes, okay, from now on, everything we put on is going to say Operation Bruce Sky, like Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Sky like, we got to put that on there because they don’t want anyone. If we say the bank, they’re going to know the bank. And it’s like, okay, I’ll put that. So all our documents, all the plans, all the, you know, performance say Operation Bruce Sky.

And so we get in, we have this big meeting with the bank, whatever the CEO, the bank goes, Yeah, this is all great and all, but who’s Bruce Sky? Well, you told us to do that. He’s like, no, no, no. There’s a billboard around the site that has blue skies. We want it to be Operation Blue Sky. So that was the beginning of that. It turned out that, you know, the bank then got acquired by Chase, not relocating the headquarters to Chicago. And the way that we thought and what we were able to do then is, you know, ultimately Citadel was kind of in growth mode. They end up doing that.

We moved a couple other Holland and Knight and a couple other tenants into the building, and we both, you know, I believe it was a 50 story tower there that is still there to this day. And, you know, it was renamed the Citadel Center ultimately. But that was a lot that had been available for many years. And so, yeah, it was a pretty fun project to work on at that time. And as a young 20 something guy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:38

How did that, because it seems like a big pivot. What are some of the lessons learned in okay, we had this deal and then the whole project kind of pivots and we need to change course.

Scott McKibben: 10:53

Yeah. You know, I think that happens in pretty much every deal. You know, like so I went to University of Wisconsin, as you said, and Graaskamp was called, they call it the Graaskamp program. He was there. He died a little before I started there.

But he was, you know, very well known in the analysis of real estate and how you do it, but also just his approach to deals. And I’m probably going to get the quote wrong, but basically a real estate deal is like a series of obstacles to going to a common goal. And, you know, that’s what it is. It’s just it feels like every day there’s a lot of ups and downs. You know, you feel like you’re making great momentum on a deal, and then something goes wrong and something comes up and you think you’re about ready to close it and an environmental issue pops up and you got to deal with that.

And now you got to do phase two. And it’s constantly just being persistent through struggles. That’s what real estate is. And the people that do that are able to kind of just continue to kind of muddle through and push through that and get the deals done. But that’s why not everyone does it. I mean, it’s not incredibly hard, but it is. It takes a lot of persistence to really get through a real estate deal. Almost any deal, even the little ones that have these issues. You know.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:09

You have a background in competitive sports. How has that helped you?

Scott McKibben: 12:14

You know, I think that a lot of the people that I interact with that are in my role also probably have a sports background. I played Division one tennis at DePaul University. I wouldn’t probably compete there these days. They have a lot of European players that would just smoke me. I wouldn’t even be close, you know, even if I was a young man. 

But the discipline of being able to do practice and sports and just that competitive nature. I’m that way on the pickleball court now, you know. I don’t do tennis anymore, but I do pickleball and it’s very similar. I mean, I definitely have a competitive nature whenever I’m doing deals.

So and I want to, you know, I want to win a deal because a lot of times you’re competing against other groups and you want them to select you. You want them to, you know, allow you the opportunity to buy a deal that sometimes, you know, not every deal is like this, but some deal times there’s 30 bidders on a deal, and you’ve got to differentiate yourself and show why you’re maybe the best group to to be selected for that deal.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:17

Another project, I don’t know if you would consider this a niche on your end, but maybe talk about the data center project in Chicago.

Scott McKibben: 13:28

Yeah, so I’ve been working a little bit on data centers. It wasn’t really an area that I ventured into, but at Brennan, you know that world started coming together and becoming a little more as AI has developed. But even before that, you know, there was just a lot more need for data, you know, throughout the, you know, kind of the whole United States. And then DC developed into a big data center market in Dallas and Chicago, kind of of probably been some of the bigger ones that have done that.

So, you know, early on we had a site called Elk Grove Technology Park, which is the old Bussey Farm site. And we sold some of the land to Microsoft. We built a building in T5, came in and put it in as a data center. And there were a couple of buildings that we sold to align. We bought the old applications building, tore that down, sold that to line, and they put up there putting up a data center.

Now I think they’re pretty close to completing. I was by it the other day. But one site in particular was a pretty interesting deal. We had bought, and it’s not necessarily a data center yet because we bought an existing office building right by Woodfield Mall. Kind of 90, you know, 290 right there. And it’s kind of right on the corner. And it’s called the three Comm building. And Capital One had been in there. It still had a lease in there but never moved in. They built out the space. It’s an immaculate, gorgeous space and it’s like over 500, about 500,000 square foot building multiple storeys.

And they had a couple hundred thousand square feet with several years left. But during Covid, they decided to coming out of Covid everyone to move downtown. And so they never occupied even though they had a rental obligation for several years. And there were a couple other tenants in there. And then at one point the FAA was about ready to sign a lease to go there, but it was at what was called a maturity default with the loan or getting close to that with Aries.

And then there were a couple other groups that were the partners on it, you know, that were the equity on it. And because of the signing that lease and no one really wanted to pay the I think I believe it was like $14 million of tenant improvements that were allocated that the lender wasn’t going to do it, because the maturity that all the other people weren’t going to put more money behind a deal, office deals, you know, a lot, you know, especially suburban office deals are struggling now. And so it was kind of a perfect storm where everything came together and we were able to buy the debt at par from Aries and then negotiate a deed in lieu of foreclosure with the two groups. And then we ended up with this building that ultimately is going to be torn down. And, you know, it could be either industrial or if, you know, the stars align.

I know Rolling Meadows, the village that it’s based in, would love to have a data center there. And we’re in the process of, you know, exploring it. When I say we, I’m no longer, I’m still an owner of the deal, but it’s a Brennan Investment Group deal that the company I left a little over a year ago, but it was a really interesting deal. It probably took about 6 or 7 months. I think we’ve talked to a couple different partners throughout the process. People dropped out. You know, there were a lot of hiccups and a lot of drama. We were talking about kind of obstacles. It just felt like there was probably one thrown in front of us almost daily for six months. And so when that finally came to fruition, it was a very good day.

And even now, to this day, it’s still not a done deal. Exactly what’s going to happen on that site. So that’s the way it works.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:57

Sometimes it just seems like a miracle something happens because there’s so many things that can go wrong. I’m curious, what made you decide to start Matterhorn Venture Partners? You could have probably continued successful, illustrious career with the last group you were a part of. What made you decide to start Matterhorn?

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