What’s Good Podcast with Camilo Miguel, Mast Capital’s Billion Dollar Builder Asks “Do You Wish You Were There?”
The Perigon on Collins. Cipriani Residences in Brickell. Little Palm Island in the Keys. Now Banyan Tree Residences in West Palm, the brand’s first residential project in the United States. I sat down with Camilo Miguel Jr., CEO and founder of Mast Capital, at the What’s Good Studio at The Moore for this week’s Good Company interview. Turns out we were born in the same hospital in Manhasset. Here is what stuck.
Miguel put it plainly: “I ask my team all the time, do you wish you were sitting there? Do you wish you were laying by that pool? And the answer needs to be yes.”
A Miami lifer who learned the business by listening. His grandparents left Syria and Lebanon for Colombia in the 1930s and 40s. His father built an educational book distribution business across South America. Camilo grew up in the middle of four sisters, with his grandmother and mother in the house too, and for all of them, “no woman was ever good enough for me.” The family came to Miami when he was a baby. Gulliver, then the University of Miami, and he never left. He did not come up through a development shop. He came up at the table. “I learned a lot just sitting at the table because I listen and I’m very inquisitive,” he said. “I recognized that I would make a lot of mistakes along the way.”
Make mistakes, just not the kind that take you down. The first deal was a friends and family land play in Las Vegas. They entitled the land and flipped the contracts before they ever bought it. Then came bridge lending across Florida with a financial partner out of Connecticut, selling tranches of the debt to banks. He was out of nearly everything by 2007, so when the crash hit he was a buyer, picking up distressed real estate debt from banks like Barclays, including his first institutional deal alongside Related Group with Deutsche Bank as the investor. Financing, entitlements, development, distressed debt. He touched every piece of the business, and that is why he structures deals differently today. “Make sure that those mistakes are not the type of mistakes that take you down.”
