Luxury Living Redefined With Gil Dezer
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What is the vision behind the Porsche Design Tower?
We were actually approached by Porsche Design. At first we said, well, what does Porsche have to do with real estate? So we had a few think tank sessions and we said, well, let's make the building for guys who love their cars. I'm the only guy who can actually bring in passengers in the car. What I've noticed when I did Porsche Design Tower, people are afraid of new things. The reaction to the car elevator then, it was strange. It's amazing how the human automatically goes to the negativity. It's a freaking elevator. It goes up, it goes down.
Sharp French, what up?
This one's luck, I let the pain inspire me. I put my all in everything I'm doing. Up until it's done, I mean for the entirety. I put in overtime, I be working. Just know I'm a gopher, man, because I earned it. They watching, I know it's time. I confirmed it. The whole society determined.
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode. I'm your host, Sean French. Today I have with me an amazing man, a businessman that's changing the face of South Florida living, the president of Desert Development, Gil Desert. What's up, baby?
Hey, how you doing? Good to be here.
Hey, man. Good to have you. You're doing so many amazing things. It's like, you know, I live in Florida, right, on the West Coast and go to Miami often with the family. See all these beautiful buildings, right? All these cool things on the oceanfront. And I never really know who's behind them. But now I'm sitting with the guy, the man that is responsible for these beautiful things. So I'm super excited to have you on the show.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Hey, heck yeah, man. Heck yeah. So listen, for the audience listening that may live in Iowa or California that doesn't know much about you or Desert Development, can you give them a little background on what it is that you do?
Well, Desert Development is, we like to consider ourselves the foremost best real estate developer here in South Florida. We are not the biggest per se, but we build the highest end quality products and buildings primarily in the best locations in Miami. from anywhere from downtown to the oceanfront, including Midtown, several other sites. Where our niche was that I'm one of the few developers who don't have the ego that needs to put his name on his building. So I don't mind having other brands on my buildings. And we started that off in 2001 with our now president, Donald Trump. We had tremendous success with Trump Towers. I built six Trump buildings here on the beach, over 2,000 units, Trump units.
Between 2001 and 2007, 2008, we got caught in a crisis like everybody else did, but we were the first ones to be able to pay off all of our loans through selling units, and that really paved the way for us to do a lot more new business, and everything worked out. I mean, if you Google it, you'll see in 2011 – We paid off $475 million of construction loans by selling units naturally. And we invited Donald Trump down and we did a mortgage burning ceremony at the Trump Royale building. It was very nice.
A mortgage burning ceremony.
That's pretty wild, man. At that time, I mean, if you remember 2011, it was a disaster. And everybody was dying left, right, and center. And we were the only ones who were doing well. So we wanted to make it known. And we made it known. And what that did was open the door to many, many other opportunities for us. We had banks started calling us to help work out some of their bad stuff. And so we were able to take that over and made money with those things. But it also paved the way for me to get the first construction loan post-crisis on the Porsche Design Tower. That was in 2012. So we started that in 2012, finished it in 16. And then I did the Armani Casa afterwards. In between, I'm doing Baccarat Tower downtown. We did the... What's it called? The...
In Midtown, the Hyde in Midtown. I also right now have a project up in Hillsborough with Rosewood. So we're doing a Rosewood residence in Hillsborough. So we have a lot on our plate, and we have a pipeline of many more oceanfront projects to go, as well as we bought the Intracoastal Mall here in North Miami Beach.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
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