Thomas Frater

Thomas P. B. Frater is the Founder & CEO of Hussar & Co., a buy-side real estate advisory and co-investment platform focused on Central Europe, which he founded around 2010–2012 in New York before relocating the focus of his work to the CEE region. A US citizen of Hungarian heritage, he holds a Bachelor of Arts in History & Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and is fluent in English and Hungarian. He currently resides in Vienna with his wife and four children.

Frater has roughly 25 years of investment, operational and portfolio-management experience spanning private equity, real estate finance and cross-border M&A across North America, Europe and Asia. He began his career in the late 1980s at the Amcena / Brenninkmeijer family office (the German-Dutch family behind a roughly $6 billion single-family office) in New York, then moved through Cofinec–PwC (Vienna/Budapest private equity and corporate finance, 1989–1994), TigerPack Capital (a China-focused packaging fund, 1994–1999), MacDermid, Inc. (1999–2003), and Tea House Partners (global packaging private equity, 2004–2010). Earlier in his career he led middle-market buy-outs in China and North America, including a ~$150 million division carve-out from a US blue-chip company.

In real estate, Frater served as a senior advisor to IMMOFINANZ AG on its ~$882 million sale of a 26% controlling stake in CA Immo, and acts as a regional advisor to Starwood Capital Group on larger off-market European real estate transactions. He is a board member of NAVIGATOR Investments Nyrt., a Hungarian SME-focused private equity and Budapest Stock Exchange advisory firm, and serves as the Hungary representative for GalCap Europe, a CEE real estate investment manager.

He is a recurring conference speaker and commentator on Central European real estate, appearing at events such as European Outlook (Budapest) and on Real Asset Media briefings, where he discusses Polish, Austrian and Hungarian commercial property markets.

• Buy-side, co-investment-oriented approach to commercial real estate in Central & Eastern Europe, emphasizing off-market deals and yield arbitrage versus Western Europe.
• Contrarian stance on asset selection — in his words, *"Being contrarian and buying retail assets makes sense,"* arguing mispriced retail and out-of-favor sectors offer value.
• Bullish on CEE capital flows: *"In investors' eyes, Poland is on a par with Germany now,"* and *"The yield factor will attract investors to Warsaw and Budapest."*
• Through NAVIGATOR, backs value-based SME private equity — acquiring and operating established industrial, manufacturing and service businesses (wood/carpentry, metal structures, machine tools, industrial valves), often in generational-succession situations rather than startups.
• Long career in packaging and manufacturing private equity and emerging-market cross-border M&A informs a hands-on, operational investment style.