What’s Good Podcast with Gil Dezer, Sunny Isles Builder with the Last Pepsi in the Desert
Six Trump towers. Porsche Design Tower. Armani Residences. Now Bentley Residences, rising on that same strip right now. I sat down with Gil Dezer for this week’s Good Company interview and covered a lot of ground. Here is what stuck.
Dezer put it plainly: “It’s amazing how people can drive by the same street all day long and think it’s junk, but another person can have a completely different vision.”
Sunny Isles was junk until it wasn’t. In 1996, on a tip from a shopping center owner named Ron Katz, the Dezers started buying every parcel of a rundown stretch of motels between Bal Harbour, Aventura, and Golden Beach. Nobody else wanted it. A year later the city incorporated, needed tax revenue fast, and threw its zoning wide open. The Dezers had jumped the gun on purpose, and the rest of the city was still years from noticing what they’d bought.
Then the boom hit, and it hit hard. In the summer of 2001, days before September 11th, Dezer signed a licensing deal with Donald Trump, poaching him away from a rival project in the process. Six towers and two billion dollars later, Trump had landed in Miami right as a wave of New Yorkers started looking for a reason to leave the city behind. “From 2001 to 2007, Miami was on fire,” Dezer said. “There was nothing you could do wrong.” Buyers were flipping pre-construction units for six figure profits before they ever closed. It felt unstoppable, until it wasn’t.
Buyer sentiment sets the price, not the building. By 2008 Dezer owed $475 million on nearly a thousand unsold units, and Lehman Brothers collapsed three days after his closing notices went out. His read on what happened next has stuck with him ever since. “Real estate is tangible,” he said. “The value of real estate is based on buyer sentiment. I woke up every day and said the building is here, it’s not going anywhere, and I’m just going to take my time to sell it and wait for people to feel better.” He negotiated an extension, paid every dollar back, got the interest rebated, and threw a mortgage burning party on the beach to make sure the whole city saw it.
