Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Gil Dezer - Developer & Visionary | From $500 Million Debt to Luxury Real Estate Empire

Transcript

Gil Dezer - Developer & Visionary | From $500 Million Debt to Luxury Real Estate Empire · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I grew up in really humble means, free bedrooms and one bathroom in the house in Queens,
• 0:04
  and then when I got into the real estate world, I said, this is what some of it is overkill,
• 0:08
  some of it's absolutely needed, and some of it is just right.
• 0:11
  Most developers build towers. Guild Desert builds icons. He turned luxury real estate into an
• 0:15
  art form, fusing innovation with brand storytelling through groundbreaking projects like the Porsche
• 0:20
  design tower and the Bentley residences. But what sets Guild apart isn't just the skyline he's
• 0:24
  changed, it's the mindset he brings. When you're the owner of the company, you have to do everything
• 0:28
  yourself. You can rely on some people. I have great people working for me. If you can't just
• 0:31
  expect everybody to do it, you gotta do it yourself. I didn't do anything that's never been done
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  before. I just put components together in a way that's never been done before. Everything's
• 0:39
  available today. Everything can be done today. I truly believe that there's always a solution.
• 0:43
  A bold thinker from a family of visionaries. Guild's mission is to create spaces that redefine how we
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  live, move, and experience luxury. To him, a building isn't just glass and concrete, it's culture.
• 0:55
  When I did the Porsche, nobody wanted to talk to me. I was just crazy idea of putting a car
• 0:58
  elevator. I finally found a guy who was able to build a form. Once we built it, then now I have
• 1:03
  all these other big elevator companies saying we might have missed out on something that's really big.
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  Everything's calculated or isn't. You have to feel comfortable and I really truly feel comfortable
• 1:11
  when I say that anything can be built today. It's just a matter of money.
• 1:14
  Guild, first of all, thank you for coming out. I appreciate you. This is one of my favorite
• 1:28
  quotes because I think it really captures your personality. The quote is, if I can't live here,
• 1:34
  I can't sell it. That's one of my favorite because I think that you have a very high bar for what
• 1:40
  you do in life, for what you build. But I'll just ask, in your words, what does that quote mean to you?
• 1:48
  Well, it means I grew up in really humble means. Until I was seven years old, we grew up in a,
• 1:56
  it was three bedrooms and one bathroom in the house in Queens. Then we moved out to
• 2:00
  Tendonville, New Jersey. That's where I grew up and went to school and everything. That's where I
• 2:04
  opened my eyes. My friends had these huge houses and all kinds of stuff. I started seeing how
• 2:10
  living can be. Then when I got into the real estate world, of course, walking around and seeing
• 2:15
  all these amazing things, I said, this is what some of this is overkill. Some of it's absolutely
• 2:19
  needed and some of it is just right. When we look at these apartments, I say, if you get to sell
• 2:27
  something, you have to believe in it. I also don't get me wrong. I also build smaller apartments,
• 2:33
  one bedroom, two bedrooms. Again, I would have lived in there maybe when I was 20, 25,
• 2:40
  but at this age now, where I have the ability to buy something better and set to myself,
• 2:46
  if I'm looking for this customer, it really all stems from, I see a lot of developers,
• 2:54
  what I call making fun of the customer. What I mean by that is they show them a kitchen and a
• 2:59
  bathroom and then they show them some floor plans and they make the customer believe it's
• 3:03
  something else. Then the final product is real garbage. You got the kitchen and the bathroom
• 3:07
  you saw, but the only developers who build a full-scale apartment in our sales office to show
• 3:13
  the actual sizes you're getting, the actual rooms you're getting, because we're not here to make
• 3:16
  fun of the guy. If you're buying something at this level of $7, $8, $10 million, we just sold
• 3:21
  the penthouse for $33 million, so if you're selling that level, you got to really treat that
• 3:29
  customer with respect and the intelligence that he most likely has showing them everything they're
• 3:34
  going to get. If I wouldn't buy something, I can't sell it. I wouldn't buy in a development where
• 3:40
  they're showing me a kitchen and a bathroom and a bunch of pictures and some Butler showing me,
• 3:44
  serving me something that's there today and not there. I've been to those.
• 3:48
  The joke is, and I'm not going to call any one of my competitors, but you have some of these
• 3:53
  hotel branded condos where you walk in at night and the restaurant's closed. What kind of hotel
• 3:58
  brand is this? Versus my places that we don't have hotel brands, but what we do is I've learned
• 4:03
  higher the best managers who work in these hotels and let them run the condo. For them, it's
• 4:08
  a no-brainer. It seems like common sense. It seems like if you look at luxury, look at the
• 4:12
  biggest best luxury brands in the world, and they have to take their customers seriously,
• 4:18
  or they'll never survive. I don't know why real estate would be any different. If you look at
• 4:24
  or met us, if you look at any beautiful luxury like LVMA, they have to take the customer seriously.
• 4:30
  There's reasons for it. There's buyers who just want to buy and salesmen who sell them the dream
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  and sell the sizzle, not the steak, so to speak, as they do, which it works. Everything sells.
• 4:42
  But I believe that when our customers come in, they see exactly what they're getting.
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  It's a great way of managing expectations. When they walk in, they're not a lot of the same
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  buildings that see the kitchen bathroom. By the time the building's ready, you have half of those
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  buildings, half of those units being sold for resale because the people aren't necessarily happy
• 4:57
  there. Is that something that idea? Was that something that you've brought? Because I know that
• 5:02
  your dad was big in New York and he was building in New York, and I kind of know a little bit about
• 5:06
  your origin story. Was that something you brought down to South Florida from New York?
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  Was that something that's uniquely yours? Well, I'd have to say it's uniquely my father never
• 5:14
  built a New York. He is a landlord. He bought buildings when renovate them, put new elevators,
• 5:19
  new windows, and rent them out. Some of them, he would co-op. He would sell floor by floor by floor
• 5:24
  by floor. That's how he got to start in the 70s. But it's a personality trait. I believe that when
• 5:32
  you sell something to a customer at this price level, I'm not talking about the guy who's buying
• 5:36
  a $500,000. That's regular run of the mill kind of okay fine. And we do those jobs. I'm usually
• 5:42
  a partner but not involved on those kind of jobs, but you make money in those things too. But if you're
• 5:46
  selling somebody their actual home where they're going to wake up every morning and take a shower
• 5:51
  and that customer, you actually meet the guy and you make a deal in a handshake, he effectively
• 5:57
  owns a piece of you. And you have to deliver for that guy. It's very important. Very, very important.
• 6:02
  And you got to take it seriously. And a lot of people, they're production mills and they're not
• 6:06
  realizing that they're building people's homes where they live. And I take it very seriously.
• 6:12
  This is a guy who's going to wake up at brushes teeth every morning. And if the water's not hot,
• 6:17
  he's going to think about me. And I don't want to be there. So I don't want to be in thoughts in
• 6:22
  the morning. If you think about what you've built and your definition of luxury, you're already
• 6:29
  giving over some really good ideas and insights about customer first. And you have to
• 6:37
  you're building a part of their life. Basically, you're building a part of their life.
• 6:41
  When you think about what luxury truly is, what are some of the ideas around luxury that you have
• 6:46
  that could be good ideas for any entrepreneur, something that is just how you focus on customer,
• 6:52
  how you focus on experience. These are things that are in all of your buildings. But what is it?
• 6:57
  If you think about, okay, my customer avatar is so and so this person, how do you think through
• 7:04
  what to give that person? We look at what is that guy in our case specifically, we deal with how
• 7:10
  does that customer live? How do they live? What are they doing every day? Are they going to work?
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  You know, these people are investors. They own companies. They're not necessarily
• 7:19
  there. What is the use of this apartment? Is there going to be a full-time residence? There's
• 7:23
  going to be a second home vacation. And we tailor the product to exactly that. And what I mean by
• 7:28
  that is we have people who come to the building. They're there for two, three weeks at a time.
• 7:34
  They're working during the weekend on the weekends, but at the same time, they have the ability to
• 7:39
  hit a button and order room service to their apartment. Everything is right there, like a hotel
• 7:46
  without the transients. There's no transients. And what makes our building special, different from
• 7:50
  all the other buildings in Miami, every one of our balconies has their own swimming pools.
• 7:55
  So it's the kind of building where if you want to know your neighbor, you go downstairs and be
• 7:59
  social. But if you want to just leave everybody, leave me alone. You can be upstairs, leave me alone,
• 8:04
  stay with, do your own thing, stay in the apartment. You don't have to leave to eat. You can have
• 8:09
  brought upstairs. Exactly like hotel experience. Right. Just like hotel. So you have the experience
• 8:14
  becomes what you want it to be. And that's what luxury is. And luxury is giving people all the
• 8:19
  options in the world. Not just option of A, B, or C. You have options of A through one billion,
• 8:24
  you know? Yeah. I think that when I think about what you're, you are an innovator. I mean,
• 8:30
  you've innovated with technology. We'll talk about that in a second with a deservator. But I think
• 8:34
  that if you even go back to like the luxury branded buildings, you've worked with Trump,
• 8:39
  Porsche, Armani, Bentley. That's already thinking different. When you started doing that,
• 8:45
  that was not the norm. So what was the, what was the thought process in terms of, because that's
• 8:50
  a very interesting idea, bringing in luxury from a completely different, I mean, Trump was in
• 8:54
  real estate. But the other ones were not in real estate, bringing luxury in and then combining
• 8:58
  it for like this ultimate customer experience. What was the, what was the impetus? What was the
• 9:02
  thing that allowed you to see that opportunity and then sort of take hold of it going back? I guess
• 9:07
  a little bit now. But well, in each case, you know, well, so the Trump thing happened. Yeah.
• 9:13
  And it happened right after September 11th. They were looking for, and we needed, we needed,
• 9:19
  we were in Sonny Ells Beach, which in 2001, nobody even knew where it was. You know, it wasn't even
• 9:23
  on the map. It just had incorporated in 1997 as its own city, own police department, all that kind
• 9:29
  of stuff. So the city was relatively new. Very new. Yeah, very new. And so 2001, we said we need to,
• 9:35
  we had a big investment there. We started buying properties right before it incorporated.
• 9:39
  So we were buying motels and little hotels up and down the beach. We owned 27 different
• 9:44
  properties at the peak. And then the city incorporated changed the zoning code, allowed for
• 9:50
  high-rise development. We flipped some of the properties, went and bought more. That's a whole
• 9:54
  story in and of itself. But then we said, well, we need something marketing-wise to put this
• 10:00
  place on the map to make everybody realize, Miami Beach was great. Sun is South Beach was great.
• 10:04
  Bell Harbor was amazing. Golden Beach was amazing. That's, that was the great part. Sonny Ells
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  was, was right between Bell Harbor to the South, Golden Beach to North and Adventurer to the West.
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  So we were surrounded by three of Miami's super-affluent neighborhoods. It was just a natural, you know,
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  mix that they were going to come in. Natural infill if you will. You saw that coming out from New
• 10:22
  York? Yeah, well, you saw it from the airplane. You literally saw it from the airplane. I mean,
• 10:26
  you know, you saw, because Sonny Ells was unincorporated. There was, in order to get a police officer there,
• 10:32
  it was 40 minutes because there was no, no local. And so when, when, when that happens,
• 10:37
  these motels turn into little ski-vy places, prostitutes, drug dealers, all that kind of stuff
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  was going on there. And we were able to buy oceanfront relatively cheap because of it. And so,
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  relatively cheap compared to what it's going for today. Yeah. We were paying at the time $2
• 10:53
  million an acre, which sells for today $100 million an acre. So 50x, okay? Yes. It's insane. It
• 11:00
  really isn't insane. And we're still paying that $100 million an acre now. And the last properties
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  were buying. So we're, we're riding up and paying ourselves a, you know, the extra money. But
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  that's why it's worth that because now the markets have gone up, price per square foot. You know,
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  when it was, when it was $2 million an acre, we were selling at $300 a square foot. Now we're selling
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  $3,000 square foot. So, you know, the world has changed over there a little bit. But, but we needed
• 11:24
  Trump to really put Sonny Ells beach on the map, put our project on the map, get the right
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  attention. And then we realized how strong this whole branding thing is. I had Trump on television,
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  everyone's the night doing the apprentice. It was like, he was my one hour advertising every,
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  every single night that I was, every, and we had to print the shows that our sales office. And
• 11:43
  we were pushing that apprentice button. He was hot. And we were making tons of sales. This was
• 11:48
  early 2000s. I mean, there was between 2001 and 2007. There's nothing you can touch that went bad.
• 11:53
  Everything was up, but it was like crazy. It was crazy, crazy. So we did, we did, in that time,
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  we did six Trump buildings, 2000 Trump units over over $2 billion sold in Trump, branded real estate.
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  But more importantly, as I found that what the branding really does, it helped put us on the map
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  as developers. It helped put the city, the area, bring attention. My, I remember my competitors were
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  saying, yeah, we're in the building next door to Trump. You know, when your competitors are saying
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  next door to Trump then, then you know you won, right? As they said, we're next door to Portia.
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  So, I mean, then you know you won when that's where the competitors are giving your building as
• 12:29
  the landmark. So, and of course in 2007, we got caught with our pants down like everybody else.
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  We owed $475 million to the banks. I had buildings closing as we speak. And so it was really 2009
• 12:47
  when we actually called for closings. And there was nobody there because the market was dead.
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  And we reworked all of our situations with the bank in 2010. And by 2011, we paid them all off.
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  We paid off $475 million in 2011, which every single unit closed and paid off our lenders like
• 13:04
  good boys, we didn't lose any buildings. And that for me, that was when my father kind of stepped
• 13:09
  aside from the business. And for me, that put me on the map, at least in the eyes of lenders,
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  because I was the, I was me and I think one other developer were the only guys who paid off loans
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  at the time. Everything else was deep in the box for closure. They took it. So it was a rough time,
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  you know, that when you think about what you were able to do versus the vast majority of people,
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  when you think, because I always like to pull out lessons like for somebody who's obviously not at
• 13:32
  your level yet, but is still like up and coming. If you were going to talk about just like resilience,
• 13:36
  perseverance, like things that you've like overcome in your life, what would be the lesson for
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  somebody who is like an earlier entrepreneur who is going through this like, hopefully not
• 13:46
  allowing $400 million. Yeah, $475, almost half a billion. I mean, that's a, that's, that's,
• 13:52
  that is a sobering experience, you know, you're, you're, you wake up and you're, you're half a
• 13:57
  billion dollars in debt and you're like, holy shit. There's nobody there to close. You know,
• 14:01
  you had, I had, we had all these units sold. Everybody with 20% deposit, we had the project sold
• 14:06
  for $1.1 billion. Okay. And with, and all 20% deposit, the values went down by half. So a guy with
• 14:14
  a 20%, let's say he had a million dollar unit with $200,000 deposit, the not the units now worth
• 14:18
  $500,000. He's not closing. Why would he lose it? If he closed, he'd lose a half a million dollars
• 14:24
  basically. We renegotiated with some of them and, and in order for them to not lose their 200,000,
• 14:30
  but then lawyers popped up, get your deposit back.com and all that fun stuff. So, you know,
• 14:35
  um, people didn't close. And so we, again, the product was good location, location, location,
• 14:41
  we were on the beach. We had the right size units. We had the Trump brand still on the building.
• 14:45
  We, and, and, and specifically in 2010, Brazil took off. Brazil, the dollar was, was weak against
• 14:52
  the rail. Yeah. And we went in through the top of Brazil. We got some of the best brokers and best
• 14:57
  clients in Brazil who made a lot of noise that were buying Trump. Brazilians love Trump. Um,
• 15:01
  they love, love, love Trump. They still love Trump. Yeah, they, they love Trump. And, and so, um,
• 15:06
  that was it. We, we, we wound up hitting Brazil hard and selling, selling,
• 15:10
  you know, we're selling almost 30 units a month at a lower price. You don't give yourself
• 15:13
  enough credit because I know for a fact that you were still making calls, renegotiating. Oh,
• 15:17
  yeah. I know phone with everything. That's the lesson. That's the lesson. I mean, just like
• 15:20
  lining it up, the answer is when you're the owner of the company, you have to do everything
• 15:24
  yourself. You know, if you rely on, you can rely on some people. I have great people working
• 15:27
  for me, but you got it, you know, you can't just expect everybody to do it. You got to do it
• 15:31
  yourself. If you're, like you said, if you're the founder for the owner, you got to figure
• 15:35
  shit out. But also, like, I think that what you're really good at is you're, like you never put
• 15:40
  yourself above anyone. You're like, you go in the trenches, you, you, you're human to human,
• 15:45
  you get that shit done. It's my company, you know, it's your fails. It's on me. It's not on
• 15:49
  them. They get another job tomorrow. You know, I don't know if everyone, I don't know if everyone
• 15:53
  at the level that you're at thinks that way. You have to. It's yours. Who's going to care for it
• 15:58
  like you? It's your baby. It's your child, you know? So you got to make sure shit gets done.
• 16:03
  And I've known to be get frustrated and loud sometimes, you know, I can when, when things don't
• 16:08
  go my way or things are people don't do things the way I want them to. And sometimes a lot of times,
• 16:12
  I have to show somebody had to do it the first three, four or five times and then they'll pick up
• 16:16
  and do it on their own, which is really what, what happened in Trump towers? We were contacting
• 16:21
  unit owners who had deposits. So it's not like I was cold calling, hey, you want to buy a unit.
• 16:25
  This guy already had hundreds of thousands of dollars in my pocket. I'm trying to help him out,
• 16:29
  get a unit closed. So it was just a matter of teaching, teaching the system, teaching the math,
• 16:34
  teaching the levels where we are and what we could do and how we get it done. And then I gave
• 16:39
  it to my people who really got stuff done. Would you say out of your whole career that was probably
• 16:44
  one of the more stressful parts? It was, it was weird. It was scary, you know? You wake up in the
• 16:48
  morning and then the whole world's falling apart and day after day after day, not just like it was
• 16:53
  bad. It was real bad. We sent out our closing notices on a on a Wednesday and that Friday,
• 17:00
  the Lehman Brothers claps, you know, two days after I was like, holy shit, who's going to close now?
• 17:05
  You know, I mean, and it was just, you didn't know what to expect because I'd never lived through
• 17:09
  anything like that before. You know, never never experienced anything like that, never saw it.
• 17:13
  But, you know, one thing I learned that it was never to take away from me is that it's,
• 17:19
  it's real estate. You can touch it. You can grab it. So the value of it is based on what people
• 17:27
  are thinking, which is to me, I didn't really like, how do you, you know, why? Why is it based on
• 17:33
  consumer sentiment, right? After thinking good, value goes up, thinking bad, value goes up. But why?
• 17:38
  It's the same fucking real estate. It's the same building. It's looking at the same ocean. So if
• 17:42
  that's really what makes prices move up and down, it's consumer sentiment based on what they're
• 17:47
  seeing in the news, whether it's based on interest rates, then just sit and wait, you know, wait
• 17:50
  till they're feeling good again. And so, you know, if you can, obviously, if you have the wherewithal,
• 17:54
  but sit and wait because it's, it's foolish to reason why things go at the same time,
• 17:59
  I am that guy who, when consumer sentiment is down, I buy everything I can, you know, because if
• 18:04
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  terms and conditions apply if you're hiring. Indeed is all you need. Do you think in terms of
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  like when you, the buildings you build, do you consider them investment plays or pure like
• 20:12
  lifestyle luxury? I want to live in it because a lot of people listen to this also think about
• 20:16
  real estate about how I don't make money. How do I leverage it? It's investment obviously because
• 20:22
  it's a real estate investment and over time it will go up. I don't sell it to people as an investment.
• 20:27
  I don't think it's not an investment that I would invest in per se to see a return.
• 20:33
  I'm selling a guy an eight million dollar unit. It's probably going to be a 10 to 12 million
• 20:37
  dollar unit when it's over. No question about it because if you look at what my neighbors are
• 20:41
  charging where the markets are at. So I'm giving the guy an incentive to buy now. But he's leaving
• 20:45
  me at 50% deposit. So I'm like eight million dollar unit. He's leaving me four million bucks.
• 20:50
  If it goes up to ten million dollars and he made two million bucks, is that an investment?
• 20:53
  I mean, I'm sure he could do better in the stock market. He'll be up. He'll have equity.
• 20:59
  When he closes, he'll have the warm and fuzzy. He's got equity. He got a good deal.
• 21:02
  But is he retiring off of this unit? No. Is that a good investment? I'd say go put your money
• 21:08
  in the S&P. He'll do better in the same four years. That's where I would call it an investment.
• 21:14
  But at the same time, at the same time, the investment comes that if you don't buy now,
• 21:21
  you're not going to get anything at this price. Because if you think it's getting cheaper,
• 21:25
  just wait. Nothing's getting cheaper. Real estate is going up in cost. Not value. That's where
• 21:30
  there's going to be an influx of cost versus value. If we have to start buying all this stuff from
• 21:35
  China with tariffs and all that kind of stuff, the costs are going to go through the
• 21:39
  fucking roof and it's going to exceed what the market value is going to be. And that's where you
• 21:43
  are going to see a slow down construction. And that's why I tell anybody whatever you're buying.
• 21:49
  And a developer came to me two years ago. I'm not going to mention very well known developer,
• 21:56
  smart people, apparently smarter than me. I'm going to tell you the truth. Because they showed me
• 22:01
  a project and I'm like, this thing barely pencils out. You know, they're scraping at the financials
• 22:06
  or not. The finance, it wasn't a great project. It wasn't like, again, I wouldn't invest in it.
• 22:11
  I can understand other people investing in it. That'll make some money. But it's not, I do home runs.
• 22:15
  I like to do home runs only. And you can't find home runs all day, but we look for them.
• 22:21
  So I said to myself, why is this guy even doing this shit? What is he wasting his time to make a
• 22:26
  6% return at the end of the day? Now, here we are two and a half years later. The building is coming
• 22:31
  out of the ground. Tariffs are coming. I'm looking at myself that that guy, that was a bad deal then.
• 22:38
  So he's fucked. No, no, no, no, no, no. It was a bad deal then, but he'll never be able to build it
• 22:42
  for that price again. So as bad as a deal it was, he was the smartest guy on the planet because
• 22:47
  the replacement cost on that thing that he did two years ago versus today can't do it.
• 22:52
  So if it's a, it was a, his bad deal will wind up being a great deal. And I just, you know,
• 22:57
  I didn't want to trade four quarters for a dollar and sit there. But yeah, you don't have a
• 23:01
  crystal ball either. But, but you don't need to do it because it's the same theme over and over
• 23:08
  and over again. This stuff is not getting any cheaper. You know, 2008-2009 was a shit show,
• 23:13
  but you navigated successfully. What was the idea about bringing in, because Trump was a sort of
• 23:19
  like a well-known real estate brand. Porsche, Armani, Bentley, these are not what well-known
• 23:24
  real estate brands, right? These are car brands, right? Or these are luxury brands, car brands. But
• 23:29
  when you decided to do this strategy to bring in these names, what was the thought process? It was,
• 23:34
  you had the idea of brand with Trump. But what was the next thing that made you want to do this?
• 23:39
  It was, it was an evolution of thought process. We heard that, so we started out with Porsche design.
• 23:47
  Okay, you have to understand how I got to these car brands. It was difficult at the time.
• 23:52
  They didn't want anything to do with the real estate. But Porsche design was the, was the part of
• 23:56
  the Porsche company that did the sunglasses and the lighters and they had the retail stores.
• 24:01
  So I went to the Porsche design company and they were the ones looking to do a licensing,
• 24:06
  knowing that they had the name Porsche and the logo in their name that they can maximize on
• 24:10
  their Porsche design. At the time, I believe the whole Porsche design part of the company was
• 24:15
  doing something like $80 million a year in revenues. Oh, it's small. It's very small. Yeah, right?
• 24:20
  It's the tail of the whole Porsche company. Porsche company doing $9 billion a year.
• 24:25
  So easy to get to, easy to make a deal with and we made a deal with them. It was the Porsche design
• 24:31
  tower. What had happened half afterwards was Volkswagen did a leverage buyout on Porsche.
• 24:37
  They took over the company and they forced the sale of Porsche design, which was owned
• 24:42
  half by Porsche the car company, half by the Porsche family. So they forced the Porsche family
• 24:47
  to sell out and then I got tucked into the Volkswagen group. And that's how I got my way access
• 24:53
  to Bentley and all these other brands that we have that we've been talking about and to them.
• 24:57
  And so that's how that happens. And they were, they were okay. So like the small subsidiary
• 25:03
  willing to realize that it was not easy. It was not easy. I had to convince them. I said,
• 25:07
  look, Donald Trump, the only thing he has is his name and he gave it to me, right? He didn't have,
• 25:12
  he wasn't even have a product. He wasn't manufacturing cars or anything like that.
• 25:16
  These guys, you manufacture cars. You need a lifestyle component. We'll, you know,
• 25:20
  we sat down with them. They were, we really guided them through the process because a lot of the
• 25:25
  things that we taught them, you're dealing with executives who are not at the same level as our
• 25:30
  customer pool, if you will, you know? And so I represent the customer pool and say, this is
• 25:35
  what the customer wants. This is what they need. This is what they, and they go, oh, yeah,
• 25:38
  that's great, great, great. And so, you know, they didn't say no on me on anything.
• 25:42
  Few things like they, we have to stop production of our brochures because the brake calipers
• 25:45
  were not red. Things like that. They were obsessed with the details. Oh, for sure. It's
• 25:51
  still till today. I mean, they checked the building and everything else to make sure that, yeah,
• 25:55
  of course. No, that building is a hundred percent Porsche. I mean, it smells, breathes, looks,
• 26:00
  everything, Porsche. And the same way Bentley is going to be the same. And so the concept of
• 26:04
  the car elevator started. My father owns a building in New York City, which is a car dealership
• 26:10
  on 271th Avenue. It's called Manhattan Motor Cars. And it's a Porsche Rolls-Royce Bentley
• 26:15
  dealership over there. And it's a five-story building. And you drive in, you press one of five
• 26:21
  buttons on the elevator, goes up, opens the door, you drive right out. We said, okay, how cool is
• 26:27
  this going to be? Maybe instead of pressing a button, you will have an RFID or not. We go to
• 26:31
  the fire department with a design. Hey, you drive in, yeah, picks you up. Yeah, it got, they said,
• 26:36
  this is great, great, great. No fucking way. And because they said, we don't want you starting a
• 26:41
  car in the middle of the building. And so that was a whole other process of how to, of how to,
• 26:46
  what, what is Porsche have to do with real estate? We said, let's make the building for the car
• 26:50
  lover, for the guy who wants his car and his living room. And that was what our idea was.
• 26:56
  What really happened was there was something I didn't think whatever of. But based on the fact
• 27:02
  we have always South American customers, they love the fact that it was the security and the privacy
• 27:08
  and safety of them going up and down from an apartment without seeing anybody, without seeing,
• 27:13
  you know, with everybody know who they are. Instead of jumping on board and being like, and I know
• 27:18
  you probably have the patents and the IP lockdown type. But instead of being like, okay, how do we
• 27:22
  replicate this? This is a really cool feature. This serves the same clientele as us. It's like the
• 27:28
  immediately, it's like the blockbuster to Netflix, right? Yeah. They're just, they're,
• 27:32
  people are so slow. They're afraid of chill of all. They're afraid of new things. Yeah. And when
• 27:36
  they don't understand something, they're quick to say no. And it was a little education. And
• 27:41
  especially to developers, I would have expected by now that developers would have figured this out
• 27:45
  what I'm doing. Yeah. figured out that this is, you know, the, the whole reason we're sticking in
• 27:51
  $85 million elevator in a building, right? Do you understand why? Yeah. Well, because it's a privacy,
• 27:57
  it's a convenient. It's a, it's a, it's a, people don't get it. No, that's the abstract
• 28:02
  effect of it. But there's a financial reason. There's a financial reason I went and patented
• 28:06
  this shit. Yeah. What's the financial reason? The FAR, you understand real estate, you buy a
• 28:12
  specific plot of land. Yeah. It has a floor area ratio FAR in Europe, they call it GFA,
• 28:17
  gross floor area where the FAR on that site allows you to build in the case of the Bentley Tower,
• 28:23
  600,000 square feet of net, sellable square feet. Okay. That is the actual inside of the
• 28:29
  apartments, not including the balconies, not including the stairs, not including the elevators,
• 28:34
  not including the parking. So by now placing the parking adjacent to the unit, yeah, I get
• 28:42
  enough. I sell it as part of the unit and I'm picking up an additional 50% on the building.
• 28:47
  So my, my FAR was 600,000 square feet. I'm selling out 900,000 square feet. What does that turn
• 28:53
  into in writing? Yeah. I'm picking up, I'm selling my square 50% more revenue than the neighbor
• 29:01
  on the same size plot, the same size land. And yes, it's cost of being an elevator,
• 29:06
  but 300,000 square feet. Yeah. Well, what do you do? You do the math. I'm doing it at 1500 bucks
• 29:09
  a foot. That's an additional $450 million in revenue. You spent 85 million for foot. Okay. Yeah.
• 29:15
  That's why that's where the, I mean, if you were to ever call me a genius,
• 29:19
  that's where the genius comes in, because we figured out how to milk every single penny out of
• 29:23
  this building by adding value, by creating this elevator system, but every other developer gives
• 29:28
  away parking, and I'm selling it at the same price per square foot as the unit. So it's an aha
• 29:34
  moment and I am surprised at every other developer in the world is not calling me to do the same
• 29:40
  thing. I got to get it. I don't understand where the, but again, it's because it's something new.
• 29:44
  They're not used to it. Some others are trying. Some others are trying to, you know,
• 29:48
  to do buildings where you drive in, drive out, which fire departments are going to shut them
• 29:52
  down on it. I'm the only system where you don't have to start the car. That's my patent.
• 29:57
  You come in with your passenger in the car. There's a little satellite system slides out,
• 30:01
  lifts the car at least a little like chopsticks. The same way kind of like a tow truck gets
• 30:04
  the front. We do all four wheels. So the car is in park, passengers in the car, engine off,
• 30:10
  pulls you in the elevator, the deserverator, pulls you up to your floor, spits you out in your own
• 30:14
  personal garage, two steps away from your front door. And because two steps away from your
• 30:19
  front door, you have to buy that garage. And if you don't want to buy the garage, this building's
• 30:23
  not for you. You can go next door. Have you had pushback? Oh, yeah. Oh, you charged me for the
• 30:28
  garage. Yeah. Well, it's part of your unit. You know, I mean, they don't charge me next door.
• 30:31
  Okay. That's, we don't have it. That's where you need to live. Go have some valleys,
• 30:35
  sweat in your car and bang the car up all day long. Yeah. If it's not important to you,
• 30:39
  you know, if it's not important to you, if you really think about it and do the math again,
• 30:43
  I have, I'm selling four spaces. It comes to square footage wise, about two million bucks,
• 30:48
  not cheap yet. It's five hundred thousand dollars of parking space, which if you go to any city
• 30:53
  anywhere in the world and you want it to buy a parking space, that's the price. All right. And
• 30:57
  Hong Kong, they're going for two million. New York, they're going for a million. So to spend
• 31:00
  half a million dollars to have the car right there in front of you, how do you do something that's
• 31:04
  never been done before? So I know people that build technology software has never been done before,
• 31:09
  building something physical that requires engineering architecture. It's like, it's not easy.
• 31:15
  There's a lot of it. It's expensive. It's time consuming. Well, I, here's what here's what I
• 31:19
  got to be honest and say I didn't do anything that's never been done before. I just put components
• 31:24
  together in a way that's never been done before, meaning what we took is automated parking. That's
• 31:29
  been around since the 70s. But never it was always done to save space to put cars next to each
• 31:34
  other, save the driveways, you know, and make it a more efficient parking garage because garages
• 31:39
  are expensive. So I just took that same thing and adapted it in a way where we're, I'm not looking
• 31:44
  to save space. I'm looking to bring a passenger in the car. So we have to put a lot of passenger
• 31:48
  safeties. And the answer is, yeah, I'm not an engineer, but we hired the right engineers who said,
• 31:52
  hey, how can we get closer to this and how can we get closer to this? And guys would pop in and
• 31:56
  know where and I didn't understand what they were doing. But later on became some of the most
• 31:59
  valuable guys in the whole project, you know, I'm the only elevator in the world with a sprinkler
• 32:05
  system in it. Should the car catch on fire, you know, there's a sprinkler system in a moving
• 32:10
  elevator with traveling. And so they, you know, at first we said, oh, we're going to have a traveling
• 32:16
  water cable. And he said, that's going to be a fucking problem. You can't do that. So we went
• 32:20
  to head to a high-miss system with these huge scuba tanks that sit on the cab and they missed
• 32:25
  out of fire. Yeah, I mean, but you just got to sit in the thing and figure it out. Everything's
• 32:29
  available today. Everything can be done today. You know, and if it can't be done, it's easy to make
• 32:33
  it today. 3D printers and whatnot. Anything can be made. Yeah, that's true. So it's very true. And like,
• 32:38
  listen, I don't know, you just never take no for an answer when it comes to innovation,
• 32:43
  when it comes to building. I know like, I, because I truly believe that there's always a solution,
• 32:47
  you know, and the really, there's a solution. There's always a solution. You just got to think,
• 32:50
  you know, and sometimes I'm not in the position to think because I don't know the solution,
• 32:54
  but I got to, I sit there and I force my people to think. And I ask them questions of three-year-old
• 32:59
  child would ask and get that juice is going to, you know, but why can't we do it this way? And why
• 33:03
  can't we do it that way? Even though I know that their answers are going to be, but what about this
• 33:07
  and what about that and what about this and what about that? And just force experts who,
• 33:11
  they're experts, they've been doing this their whole life, you know, force them to think, you know,
• 33:16
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• 34:50
  go do yourself a favor and listen to iDigress wherever you get your podcasts. Talk about innovation
• 34:55
  for the elevator, but also talk about innovation just in general. Like I want to know,
• 35:00
  I want to know stuff that you are planning for maybe Bentley, but also for like the next building
• 35:05
  after that. I know Bentley is already kind of figured out. That's not changing, but what are
• 35:09
  like ways that you think of innovating something that is like one of the oldest industries in the
• 35:15
  world really. Really is the oldest. Yeah. I mean, one of the main innovations we did
• 35:20
  of Bentley, I don't know if you bit the sales office. Yeah. Okay. You saw the you saw the
• 35:23
  balconies. Yes. Yeah. It started out at the Trump International Hotel. One of the engineers
• 35:30
  from Porsche came over to the state of the hotel and it was a windy day outside and he said,
• 35:34
  I went on the balcony of your hotel room and I cannot light my cigar. And I don't want to go inside
• 35:40
  and light the cigar and walk out because they'll stink up the room and blah, blah, blah. And I can
• 35:44
  he says, can you above your balcony really? Can you close it with some sort of accordion or
• 35:49
  or sliding windows? And I said, that'd be cool, but you can't do that because then it becomes interior
• 35:53
  square footage. So so the we we thought and we we came up with on the balcony at Porsche,
• 36:00
  we did the balcony with the balcony rail, but then towards the edge of the balcony we did four
• 36:05
  floor floor floor ceiling panels of glass on the balcony. And what happened was now you have an
• 36:11
  area at Porsche of like a eight by 10 area zero wind on the balcony because the wind gets trapped
• 36:19
  in that little spot there. And so he says, shit, this thing works really well. Let's blow it up
• 36:25
  at Bentley. And so we Bentley has an additional skin an additional skin of window on the
• 36:30
  building, which nobody else does, but what that does is it gives you a three sided balcony. So now we
• 36:34
  have 1500 square foot balconies with zero wind on the balcony, even when the wind is blasting at you.
• 36:41
  It's it's it's going to it's a game changer Miami for whatever reason doesn't do a lot of indoor
• 36:45
  outdoor. And now we we have really because of the wind, the weather, the rains tomorrow every five
• 36:51
  seconds, you got to pull your cushions and pull your cushions out. We solve that. We solve for that
• 36:55
  problem. You don't have to touch your cushions. You don't get any wind on the balcony. And so we
• 36:59
  put a swimming pool on the balcony. We sunk it in. We have a barbecue. You can have and we invite
• 37:04
  our customers. We have dinner outside there. And we show them on the windows days look nothing
• 37:07
  flying off the table. This is an exterior extension of your living room. And so I think that's
• 37:14
  that's been a game changer. Nobody else has done it yet. They're all going to start copying me soon.
• 37:17
  I know it as they do. It's just fine. You know, but but because that's not a patentable thing,
• 37:23
  right? I mean, but but we did figure out that if you add a third wall to your balcony,
• 37:28
  when you do innovate, how do you protect like your IP? How do you make sure that people aren't just
• 37:33
  copy? Now it's it's wild to me that people aren't copying you yet. Well, at some point they will.
• 37:38
  Well, so here, so here I asked you the question and answer before how different differentiating. So
• 37:44
  at when I did the Porsche, you know, nobody wanted to talk to me. I was I was I had this I was
• 37:49
  crazy idea of putting a car elevator and even the elevator people thought I was nuts. I finally
• 37:54
  found a guy in Chicago who was able to build it for me. He was a specialty lift company and
• 37:58
  does all kinds of specialty lifts. Once we built it and as we did a proof of case or whatever they
• 38:05
  call it, you know, a proof of concept as they go. Then now I would I have all these other big
• 38:11
  elevator companies saying, Oh, shit, we might have missed out on something that's really big.
• 38:15
  I went ahead and I patented the concept. I have a worldwide patent on the deservator taking
• 38:22
  passengers in a car in the elevator adjacent to a dwelling unit. And there's good. It's a
• 38:27
  deeper than that. But I have a patent. Why? Because there's there's a revenue on this thing.
• 38:32
  It adds value. I can add hundreds of millions of dollars to a developer's bottom line. You know,
• 38:36
  so that's why I believe that this this anybody who wants it. So so now the shift we made from
• 38:42
  Porsche over to Bentley, I'm having Otis elevators building the elevator for Bentley. Otis is the
• 38:48
  largest elevator company in the world. And now that also gives me the ability to go sell this elevator
• 38:54
  concept everywhere. So I can go to Dubai and say, Hey, you want to you want an elevator? My guy's
• 38:58
  at Otis a building for you. They're building like crazy too. Yeah, but in China, you want an
• 39:02
  elevator? My guy's at Otis a building. So now with Otis in the picture and partnering with us. And
• 39:06
  hopefully that's going to come out to be a great job. So that gives me a worldwide reach on this
• 39:10
  patent that that's costing me like $300,000 a year to keep the patent alive. But you don't see them
• 39:16
  copying other parts of what you build. Not yet. Now, I mean, there's there's a one building that's
• 39:20
  doing something similar. There's another one in Brazil. A lot of them so far driving and driving
• 39:24
  out that I've seen. But you know, we're going to call the local fire departments and ask them
• 39:30
  how to have that's legal. You have a 25 year pipeline of projects, correct? Probably more. Probably
• 39:35
  more. How do you when you think about what you're building into the future? How do you manage that
• 39:41
  when markers are going to change, administrations are going to change, everything's going to change
• 39:45
  at some point? It's right. I mean, you know, when you've got that kind of stuff, it's all right.
• 39:51
  So you have to specifically the 25 year pipeline we have is all different product types. So whatever
• 39:57
  meaning all that I have 1800 units of of of workforce housing that we're planning on doing,
• 40:03
  we have a 2000 unit project of super luxury with a canal and everything on the intercostal
• 40:07
  mall. I have four more ocean front sites, which is probably another, you know, 250 units each
• 40:13
  of those of condos. So, but each one is the world goes up and down for each one of us. One day,
• 40:20
  rentals are hot, one day real, real, real, real, real hot, one day condos are hot. So over that time,
• 40:24
  you know, we'll just ebb and flow with the market. I mean, when you when you build these things,
• 40:29
  it's not about the market. You're in it, you know, you're in it for for two administrations, you know,
• 40:34
  from the day you start to the day you stop, it's six to seven years. So it's it's not just who's in
• 40:40
  office that day and buyer sentiment that day. You're going to have to live with these things forever.
• 40:43
  Do you see some new technologies in the real estate space or just in like not even real estate?
• 40:50
  It's like luxury and lifestyle. What's something new that you will eventually be excited about
• 40:56
  incorporating? A lot of robotics. I think robotics are going to be a super game changer on
• 41:02
  everything. We are already looking at them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I am already I'm working on
• 41:08
  making a machine. They haven't already, but they don't have it right. Package delivery,
• 41:13
  you see you live in the house. You don't have the problem. I absolutely can't. Okay. Yeah. So Amazon
• 41:17
  today is a force, you know, and it's a force of how everybody's getting their stuff in their units.
• 41:22
  And it's been a real headache for for buildings. The package rooms and the buildings and organizing
• 41:27
  it and and what unit gets what and how do you communicate with the with the resident of his stuff
• 41:32
  is here. His stuff is not here. Is he in residence? Is he not in residence? I think a robot to
• 41:37
  deliver to the units and have signed the received and all that fun stuff. That's that's the way it's
• 41:41
  going to be going. And I think that's what absolutely needed. You see them in some hotels as a
• 41:46
  butler. Yeah, I see no. But those things don't carry up proper payload. They carry a payload
• 41:51
  that's like, you know, for for a six pack of coke. And you know, that's the problem with those
• 41:54
  and and also the technology on that is already, you know, dead. So so like true luxury and true
• 42:00
  convenience, it's getting I believe my tagline is luxury is privacy. So and that's me personally.
• 42:08
  It's not for everybody, but luxury. But if I can go and accomplish everything I need without
• 42:12
  having to ask anybody for assistance, that's luxury. And what I mean by that is, you know, if I
• 42:17
  have to ask for my valet to get the car and that's a problem. That's a pain in the butt. Just because
• 42:23
  there's one more person I got to deal with and one more person I got to I got to make my hair look
• 42:26
  nice and smile. And you know, I want to just be able to come and go as I do in a single family home,
• 42:32
  right? So we do that in the place. I want to be able to just like ordering Uber Eats, you know,
• 42:37
  on your phone where you don't talk to a person. How much people love that? They order Uber Eats
• 42:41
  and food. Magic food comes shows up. You can have that downstairs. You can have the same thing.
• 42:46
  And it comes up eight in 10 minutes. Be from the guy who you knew who was cooking it. You know,
• 42:50
  the ingredients. I mean, a little bit letter, you know, a better level of that kind of experience.
• 42:55
  I mean, and and and then having the ability of just, you know, shutting out the world or coming
• 43:00
  downstairs and and meeting same people in your same socio economic situation, which is the other
• 43:06
  party. You want to be living with people like yourself, you know, because I've made the mistake
• 43:11
  of building a building once where there's one bedroom units, 800 square foot units mixed in with
• 43:15
  4,000 square foot units. And there's a two tier system and two second class system in that building.
• 43:20
  The guy with the one bedroom, he's downstairs saying, we don't need six values. And the guy with
• 43:25
  the four thousand says, we need four more values. I waited four minutes for my car, you know, so
• 43:30
  it's a you know, it's a lot goes into this. You know, people don't realize. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 43:34
  No, I know. And people have to live together. You're creating a community. Yeah. And you can't
• 43:39
  escape each other. You can't escape each other. See, the community has to be all like my
• 43:42
  dead residents, you know, and people of the same interest. We've left we've left buildings
• 43:47
  way, way earlier on in my life when you're just renting just because the building wasn't the right,
• 43:51
  like we were doing well financially or we were doing well in our and it was a mix of like,
• 43:56
  you know, kids that were maybe two people sharing a condo versus families like at every level.
• 44:03
  It doesn't matter what level could be a four thousand square foot could be bigger than that. Whatever
• 44:07
  it is, you always want to be around people that are sort of living the same life as you. And I
• 44:12
  think that that's just a pleasant experience. You want to be in the right neighborhood. That makes
• 44:16
  the living experience. Exactly. Who wants a bed neighborhood? You never do. That's what that's
• 44:20
  that this is life. That neighbor will you don't want to go home when you have a bed neighbor.
• 44:23
  Also, just last last comment on just real estate and there's some other things that I want to talk
• 44:28
  about just like luxury and lifestyle that you've included, but also I want to talk about some of the
• 44:32
  people that that buy your units and what luxury really really means. But just on the topic of
• 44:40
  like future projects and South Florida in particular, you are also Florida. Why do you believe in
• 44:50
  South Florida so much? I know that you've been here for forever, but say you never ever, you know,
• 44:56
  made a mark in South Florida. Do you still believe in this part of the US?
• 45:00
  Well, I was definitely here at the right place at the right time. In this place goes up, goes
• 45:06
  down, goes up, goes down, but every time it goes down, it comes back up. And it comes back at double.
• 45:11
  You know, so I believe in the United States, but I also see what's going on everywhere in the United
• 45:18
  States and the population shifts. And so we are very fortunate to be here. That's why I say,
• 45:23
  you know, and like I said earlier, this is not stopping. More people are going to come.
• 45:28
  If you come here on vacation, it's very hard to leave, you know, oh, I know. I came here six years
• 45:32
  ago. Yeah, and if you have the ability to pay as an uproot and leave, if you're working from home,
• 45:37
  if you know, you know, that people will do that. Why not? No state income tax?
• 45:41
  I saw yesterday somewhere a New York, New York state and Florida state have roughly the same
• 45:48
  amount of population and New York state being a democratic democratically run, they're paying,
• 45:52
  they have double the budget, double the annual budget of Florida. I mean, why? Why?
• 45:58
  Because they're shoveling some snow. I mean, we have hurricanes. That's the offset. You know,
• 46:02
  so I don't get it. You know, there's people, this is a well-run state. DeSantis is awesome. Yeah,
• 46:07
  he's really an awesome guy. And so, you know, it's people appreciate that, you know.
• 46:14
  I know that people aren't investing in real estate in California or New York or a lot of the other
• 46:18
  like very democratic states. But is there anything else that you would, you know, I know that you
• 46:24
  are entrenched in Florida, but are there other places that even somebody who's like early on
• 46:29
  starting maybe they want to buy a, you know, their first property for investment? Where else would
• 46:36
  you look? I mean, if you listen to the numbers on immigration and population growth, we've
• 46:42
  expanded by 5% the size of this country. And the last couple years based on Biden letting those
• 46:47
  people, now they, they can't necessarily afford houses and they'll double and triple up, etc,
• 46:51
  etc. But over time that will trickle down into a tremendous amount of housing needs. And so any,
• 46:56
  any relative level of housing is going to be lucrative or as soon as you can do it right in the
• 47:02
  right neighborhoods, etc. Again, we're in a microcosm of super hand. I am building in Orlando. I'm
• 47:09
  building, we have a thousand units of rentals. We have two buildings done, 350 units done each,
• 47:14
  and we have the third building about the start. So we're in all those kind of markets too,
• 47:18
  and we see it in, and, and it's Florida. I mean, yeah, it's all Florida. They're building more
• 47:24
  universals, billion in the park. It's just everything's getting bigger and bigger. Do you think it's
• 47:27
  better to be close to the real estate you invest in and just know the region versus just look
• 47:33
  for the most strategic state or opportunity? It's definitely a localized business. Absolutely. And
• 47:38
  when you, with your feet on the ground, you'll do a lot better than just like flying around and
• 47:42
  I see this and I see that also managing it, managing the business, managing the relationships
• 47:50
  within the business. When you're local, it's more important. I see a lot of these New York
• 47:54
  developers come from out of town and they get to launch hand it to them. Subcontractors will
• 48:00
  charge them a different amount just knowing that they're one hit wonders. They're only here because
• 48:03
  the market's hot today and they're not around. Versus me, I've been working with some of the same
• 48:07
  subcontractors for the last 20 years. So it's a different pricing in that respect. So there's
• 48:12
  a lot that goes into it being local for sure. And I even said to myself, when people say,
• 48:16
  let's do a project that I say, I'm not set up to go build in that place. But find me the right
• 48:20
  developer who's the guild desert of that town and I'll put money behind them. For your buyer,
• 48:26
  for your person that lives in your buildings, do you think that profile of a luxury person's
• 48:30
  ever going to change or are there standards, there are standards? You see them changing at all
• 48:34
  in the near future. What's changed is that there's always the luxury buyer who's extremely
• 48:40
  discerning and requires. But what's changed is you get that lottery winning,
• 48:46
  in money, a lottery winning, a basketball player or a singer or something like that.
• 48:52
  They come in and you have to kind of explain to them how to conform to everybody else.
• 48:57
  Did they have a lot of special requests?
• 48:59
  No, more like we have a special request of them to behave and not smoke pot in the elevators
• 49:07
  and that kind of stuff. That's what it is. When you move into these buildings, you have to
• 49:15
  surround it by ladies and gentlemen. You have to behave like ladies and gentlemen.
• 49:20
  I'm sure you have opinions on new money versus old money.
• 49:24
  Money is green. It's all the same. I sold a unit to a guy who was an absolute class act,
• 49:35
  absolute gentleman, even an elegant way carried himself and everything else. He bought a unit for
• 49:41
  me and I said to him, he was retired. I said, what did you do in your past life?
• 49:46
  This was like, I'll tell you what, this was early 2000s. He said to me, I was a UPS driver.
• 49:52
  And I invested all my UPS stock and UPS went public, early 2000s, around then.
• 49:57
  And the guy became an overnight millionaire after being a UPS driver.
• 50:01
  And so this is a guy, a regular joke, but he didn't look like a regular joke.
• 50:04
  An act like a regular joke had the serving taste and he bought a nice apartment from me,
• 50:08
  which he bought a $300,000 apartment which today is worth $1.2 million. Easy, maybe even more.
• 50:13
  Real estate in my opinion is one of the best investments. I truly believe it's one of the best
• 50:16
  investments. I think that more people should be in real estate in some capacity, whatever it is.
• 50:20
  I mean, outside of the fact that it is a physical asset that you can touch,
• 50:24
  you can leverage as well, which is also great. But I find that people,
• 50:30
  if you're just running a paycheck, it's very easy to just take all that paycheck and just spend
• 50:35
  it. And then you make a little bit more and then lifestyle creep. And I mean, this is more of a
• 50:40
  less than people that are very early on just starting out. But if you have a little bit left over,
• 50:46
  like put that money into a real estate deal, find a way to invest its own compounds,
• 50:51
  put it into, you know, if there's a sort of a blue chip stock, something like that.
• 50:55
  Yeah, because it's getting harder and harder to put a little money in real estate now.
• 50:58
  It is getting harder and harder. So I think the answer is like, start sooner than later.
• 51:02
  It used to be deal sizes were 5 to 10 million, and those same deal sizes are now 50 to 75 million.
• 51:07
  Yeah, I know. I know. And so it was easy to jump in, but now it's...
• 51:11
  Do you think that somebody who actually has made some money? So say they have, you know, say they
• 51:14
  had an exit, 50 million dollar exit, 100 million dollar exit. These are, these are decent sized
• 51:19
  companies they've built by this point. And they want to, they want to get into real estate.
• 51:24
  And just because you're a good entrepreneur doesn't mean you're a good investor.
• 51:26
  That's one thing that I've learned many times. You got to learn the game too. It's another game.
• 51:30
  You got to learn. Do you think that they should put their money into real estate? Do you think
• 51:35
  you should put their money into a fund? Do you think they should manage your product? Like,
• 51:39
  how do you think through when people come to you for real estate advice? Because I'm sure
• 51:42
  annoyingly all your friends who are not in real estate probably ask you. They have money.
• 51:47
  How do you get started? It depends on the person. I mean, are you a passive investor?
• 51:53
  Are you an active investor? Do you really want to get involved? Do you care? You just want to put
• 51:57
  your money and wake up and look at a bank statement. You know, real estate has a bit of active investing
• 52:03
  in there. So if somebody's getting into real estate, I mean your first building was 80 million dollar
• 52:08
  building. That's the decent sized building. Is that a big building to jump into for somebody
• 52:12
  getting started? Oh, yeah. That was huge. Yeah. So I mean, it was a story of how we got started
• 52:17
  in that. We had partners initially. My father got into an argument with the partners and bought
• 52:21
  them out. And I was working for the partners learning, you know, I'd never built anything. I was 24
• 52:26
  years old, 25. And when I father got into a fight with the partners, they were going too slow.
• 52:33
  He said, hey, just in the time we've been sitting here, the land went up by 10 million dollars.
• 52:38
  And so they said, if it went up by 10 million dollars, past 5 million and buy us out.
• 52:41
  And he said, okay. And he paid 5 million dollars to buy them out. That was the first day I had
• 52:46
  a cigarette in front of my father. I was like, what the fuck are you doing? You know, I mean,
• 52:51
  we don't know what we're doing. Never built anything. And my father was at a lot of confidence in me.
• 52:55
  He said, you're smarter than all those three guys in the room. You'll figure it out. And it was a good
• 53:01
  confidence, a good pile of the back. And we figured it out. We figured out construction.
• 53:04
  They've been building since the days of the pyramids. So, you know, it's not that crazy.
• 53:09
  We're not brain surgery. You got to figure out how to do it. And that's why by my third building,
• 53:13
  I got bored of building regular buildings. We started putting car elevators and swimming pools on
• 53:17
  balconies and seeing how we can over complicate the most general situation. Yeah, I don't know.
• 53:22
  I feel like people are scared to take risk like that. I think a lot of people will be scared to take
• 53:25
  risk. You have to feel comfortable. And I really truly feel
• 53:30
  comfortable when I say that anything can be built today. As far as molded, you can mold concrete
• 53:36
  in any shape. The steel, the computers behind it can tell you how to make something stand up.
• 53:40
  And so, anything can be done. It's just a matter of money, right? So, first you got to start with
• 53:44
  anything you can be done. Then you've got to figure out how to make it economically feasible.
• 53:47
  So, where you still make money on the job. If you don't have it, how did you get that,
• 53:52
  you didn't put up the 80 million cash you had banks behind you and stuff like that.
• 53:55
  We had, yeah, well, yeah, we had a construction loan of 60 million and we had that.
• 54:00
  So, that's a good size construction. Yeah, yeah. From a bank, there's no longer a business.
• 54:04
  How do you get them to trust and bet on you? It was not easy. We had to, you know,
• 54:09
  we had to promise, we had to show, we had to do with this, we had to show sales, we had to show
• 54:12
  that we had the construction team, the contracts were all eyes dotted teeth crossed. Everything was
• 54:16
  all properly lined up. And we found colonial bank to give us a loan because the regular banks were
• 54:21
  not willing to talk to us. It's one of those things where, you know, they tell you, for this job,
• 54:26
  you need experience. Nobody's going to hire you without the experience. But then where do you
• 54:28
  start? Where do you need the experience? It was one of those situations, for sure. We didn't have
• 54:32
  experience. Nobody wanted to give us a loan. But then once you get experience, now everybody's
• 54:36
  your best friend. Same with the car elevator, you know, and nobody wanted to touch me when I was
• 54:40
  building the desirator. But then once I built it now, I had, oh, just Koneg, everybody running
• 54:44
  after me. Koneg, everybody running after me to do it, these are the elevators, you know, so,
• 54:48
  yeah, no, it's a, it's a good lesson because like, I mean, like, I get it, like, you know, you
• 54:52
  didn't start with zero cash on that first building, but a $60 million loan was a lot. Yeah, that's a
• 54:57
  lot. It was big. And you could make the argument that a lot of people could replicate even the
• 55:03
  in a slightly smaller scale that first build, if they're smart. Today, for sure, today, today,
• 55:08
  to get a $60 million loan is easier. And I would think. And today, with, there's so much money out
• 55:13
  there, if you have the right, it's the business plan. Okay, so everyone I know is so Florida,
• 55:20
  the first time they hire a GC and a team, they get screwed. How did you not get screwed? Or did
• 55:25
  you, and you figured it out in spite? You know, it's, it's one of those, what do you really call
• 55:31
  screwed? Of course, you're gonna get screwed. Yeah, I get screwed all every day because I'm the
• 55:34
  guy who's paying for everything, you know? So, you know, but sometimes you get screwed and you can't
• 55:41
  take it personally because it is what it is. You know, there's things the architect left off the
• 55:46
  plans. There's, I have a doll in my office that looks like one of my engineers where you can
• 55:51
  actually press and choke his, choke his neck. So my guy's got it for me. So I don't want to mention
• 55:57
  the guy's name, but I choke his neck because I want to, you know, that's the guy you want to choke.
• 56:00
  But these things are where they are. And, you know, fortunately, we have, we price our things right.
• 56:05
  We have a cushion inside of it to absorb any hiccups that come along. But, you know, you just,
• 56:09
  you can't take it personally. Just keep my move forward. I love it. Yeah. Um, okay, a few more. What
• 56:13
  do you call them? Uh, uh, well, with a, my gillism, gillisms, yeah. That's what my, my team calls my,
• 56:20
  my philosophical, uh, some of them are good. Yeah. Some of them are very good. I, I wrote out a
• 56:24
  couple that I think. So just tell me what these mean to you and what these mean for people that are
• 56:28
  listening. Success is not a number. Success is the feedback that I get on these buildings. Yeah.
• 56:34
  So you don't chase money. I have, I have enough money. Fortunately, thank God. You know,
• 56:39
  I come over to, you know, I have enough money. Yeah. The feet, yeah. Come on. What better feeling
• 56:44
  that? You know, somebody's like, oh, my God. I have a guy that he says, you created my life. He
• 56:49
  says, you created, but the reason I go downstairs and have breakfast is because of you put that
• 56:54
  restaurant there and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, very like, well, profound things. You
• 56:58
  don't think about that stuff. You know, um, so they, and they appreciate it. And they appreciate it
• 57:04
  because I did set it all up for them. I got the chef. Who's the guy there? We set up every,
• 57:08
  you know, the, got a miss one star chef. Yeah. Well, that's now for the next hour. You know,
• 57:12
  that's a big one. Yeah. Um, every no gets you closer to a yes. Yeah. Very true. Don't take no
• 57:19
  for an answer. Don't think no, you know, and I, and I, and I, to the point where the word no
• 57:24
  for me is a really like, like, I don't like it. You know, and, and so, uh, and, and I don't,
• 57:30
  I also like when people tell me no, I have a, uh, in Spanish, they call it become cup of
• 57:35
  trussle, you know, like they, they tell you no, and you're like, you want to even more, you want
• 57:38
  even more. So, um, and so that's where I never really took no for an answer. And, and, uh,
• 57:44
  and I also taught my staff in part of our training that we do in my hotels and on all my properties.
• 57:49
  You're not allowed to use the word no. If you can't do something for somebody, you can say,
• 57:55
  we, we, we can't, we don't do it this way. We can't do it this way, but this is how we can do it.
• 58:00
  And never, never give the negative without offering the policies. Yeah, find a solution because,
• 58:05
  you know, just to say, oh, you, I'm sorry, you can't do that. No, I, it was France. The piss me off.
• 58:11
  You ever been in France? Anything you asked for, no, no, no, no, no, no, I want to punch every
• 58:15
  French person. Tells me I know possible. You know, why is that? I can't get ketchup. No
• 58:18
  Pizzaboo. No, yeah, I'm sure you can get, I figure figure it out. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't park
• 58:22
  the car after four o'clock, no Pizzaboo, no Pizzaboo, like, you know, everything there with those
• 58:26
  French people there. But that's the difference. There's two very different types of people in this
• 58:30
  world, right? There's people that'll say no, or they'll come to you with a problem, or the people
• 58:33
  that'll just figure it out. And who do you want to be around? Right. Exactly. You want to be around.
• 58:38
  People just figure it out. Um, okay, last few questions. Uh, but before I go there, uh, I just want
• 58:44
  you to leave the audience with like, where should they go to connect with your work, what you're
• 58:49
  working on, website, social, I don't know what you want to drop. But Bentleyresidences.com is our
• 58:56
  latest project desert.com is our website. But I don't know how well maintained it is. That's
• 59:01
  fine. That's fine. 3059321,000 is our main office number. You can reach us there. Um, yeah. And
• 59:08
  and we, we're doing, I'm projects going on right now for, for us. I'm doing the main focus
• 59:13
  is Bentley. I'm also partners 50% partners in the project in Hillsboro. It's a rosewood in Hillsboro
• 59:19
  where it's beautiful. It's really going to be fucking well. I gotta say, I'm not as involved as
• 59:24
  I'd like to be, but the designers there knocked it out of the park. It's going to be an 11 story
• 59:29
  building where the first entire floor is all amenities. It's really going to play it be a place
• 59:33
  you're going to want to live. Okay, last questions. Uh, first one would be what would be out of all the
• 59:38
  words of wisdom that your dad taught you growing up? What was the most important idea or thought or
• 59:45
  piece of wisdom that he left you with? My father told the story. I don't know if people know the story
• 59:51
  or not. This is Michael Deser philosophy. Okay. And it's awesome. And you see, he tells the story of
• 59:57
  the young bull and the old bull. And they're all at the both at the top of the mountain. Yeah.
• 1:00:01
  And the young bull says, the old bull. He says, Hey, Dad, Dad, look at all the cows down there.
• 1:00:06
  Let's go run really fast. Run down there and go fuck one of the cows. And the old bull says to
• 1:00:11
  the young boy says, son, let's walk slowly and fuck all the cows. And so that's the answer. Don't run
• 1:00:18
  just to fuck one of them. Take your time. Fuck them all.