Matt Ross, a member of the California State Bar since 1990 and a licensed real estate agent, grew up on Carbon Beach in Malibu. He attended Webster Elementary School, Malibu Park Junior High and graduated from Santa Monica High School. Now a resident of Pacific Palisades, Matt has lived most of his life by the ocean in Santa Monica Bay.
Matt's clients possess tremendous buying power across the residential and investment-grade real estate spaces, and include entertainment executives, real estate investment trusts and charitable foundations/endowments with real estate focused holdings.
A graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the USC Gould School of Law, Matt has had a successful career in entertainment, politics, law and philanthropy. A former Legislative Assistant in Washington, D.C., Matt is a skilled negotiator with thirty years of experience representing and working with high net-worth clients and major institutions.
Matt practiced law in Los Angeles and Malibu and later was a Business Affairs executive for CBS Entertainment before becoming the Executive Director of the Western Region office of a prominent national fundraising organization, American Friends of the Hebrew University. As one of the top major gift fundraisers in Los Angeles, in the past ten years Matt led a campaign that raised more than $75 million for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, including closing more than twenty gifts in excess of $1 million.
As an executive with CBS Entertainment, Matt negotiated hundreds of deals for actors, writers and directors and concluded license fee agreements worth tens of millions of dollars for CBS Network programming. In addition, he oversaw the business side of such hit programs as The King of Queens, The District and Touched by an Angel.
Matt is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Malibu Jewish Center & Synagogue where he chaired the Architecture Committee. He was a member of the Board of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Relations Committee and Chairman of its Government Relations Panel. He has been an active supporter of numerous local organizations, including the Pacific Palisades-Malibu YMCA, the Palisades Public Library, the Field of Dreams at Palisades Park and the Surfrider Foundation.
Matt and his wife Sari have two daughters, Elana, 20, a student at Northwestern University and Erin, 17, a senior at Palisades Charter High School.