Before Sunju Patel helped build a hotel investment firm with deals from Maryland to Texas, he had a company in Charleston called Montford.

In late September he brought the name back. TMGOC Ventures, the firm Patel co-founded with former Blackstone Real Estate managing director Glenn Alba, announced Sept. 29 that it is now Montford Group. The firm said its ownership, leadership, strategy and portfolio are unchanged.

“Montford Group represents the evolution of our firm, not a change in its foundation,” Patel, a co-founder and managing partner, said in the announcement. “We have built this platform by combining an entrepreneurial approach to identifying opportunities with institutional discipline in how we invest, capitalize and execute.”

The firm said the name reflects its roots in Charleston, “where he began building his real estate platform.” It was the name of Patel’s firm before TMGOC, The Post and Courier reported.

From one Moxy to 4,233 rooms

The firm now counts about $1.5 billion in existing investments and development pipeline, covering more than 4,233 hotel rooms across the country, according to its announcement, which carried a dateline from Boca Raton, Fla., where the firm lists its office. Its recent deals include the Bethesda North Marriott in Maryland, a Ritz-Carlton hotel and residences in Savannah, Ga., and a Fairmont and Element by Westin conversion in New Orleans. In July 2025 it opened a 208-room Moxy in uptown Charlotte, N.C., which it called its 18th operating hotel.

The Charleston project that started the partnership is much smaller. Patel and Alba, whose firm was Florida-based Opterra Capital, teamed up to build Moxy Charleston Downtown, a 131-room Marriott hotel at 547 Meeting St., before combining their firms in 2022, according to the announcement and The Post and Courier. When the Moxy opened April 5, 2023, it was the northernmost hotel on the Charleston peninsula, The Post and Courier reported.

Patel told the newspaper in 2024 that he had begun investing in properties on upper Meeting Street roughly a decade earlier, betting the area could become a “live, work and play” destination.

“The location is a gateway into the city,” he said. “When we started buying real estate along Meeting Street, we always envisioned a lifestyle corridor for locals and tourists.”

He has described the goal in geographic terms. “We want to extend the idea of city limits out from Calhoun Street towards the Hampton Park area around the Thompson and Moxy sites,” he said. “We’re patient and we want to make sure we do it right.”

Waiting on two more

The Moxy was meant to be the first of four hotels the partners planned for the upper peninsula, The Post and Courier reported in 2023.

The next one was supposed to be a 191-room Thompson by Hyatt on a wedge-shaped, nearly half-acre lot where Morrison Drive meets Meeting Street, a design that has drawn comparisons to New York’s Flatiron Building. In 2024 the firm planned to break ground that fall, then pushed the date to early 2025. As of September 2026, it had yet to break ground, the newspaper reported.

“The Thompson has been six years in the making, and is worth the wait,” Patel told the newspaper in late 2024.

The other, the 150-room Montford Hotel at 245 Huger St., won final approval from the city’s Board of Architectural Review on March 11. The building, planned just south of the Meeting Street ramp to the Ravenel Bridge, would rise four to eight stories, with restaurants on the ground floor and roof, a rooftop pool, ballrooms and a penthouse suite. Patel has said it is expected to join Marriott’s Autograph Collection. The Post and Courier still described it as proposed in its Oct. 17 report on the rebrand.

A fourth site, at 510 Meeting St., went on the market for $13 million in October 2024. Patel said then that his pipeline would not let the firm start designing it until 2026.

“If we don’t find the right group with the right brand and vision, we will not go through with a sale,” he said at the time.

Patel owns a few properties on the peninsula’s northern neck, where he plans more hotels, The Post and Courier reported. Montford Group said it will keep pursuing acquisitions, repositionings, adaptive reuse and ground-up development under its new name.