Of Donald Soffer’s six children, two are real estate CEOs: Jeffrey and Jackie.
The late patriarch, worth $2 billion when he died at 92 last summer, purchased swampland in 1967 and turned it into Aventura. Today, Jeffrey Soffer, who split from the family empire in 2019 with several key properties, is building his own dynasty bookended by his iconic South Florida waterfront resort, Fontainebleau Miami Beach, and its sister property in the Nevada desert, Fontainebleau Las Vegas.
In his latest move to keep Fontainebleau Miami Beach relevant in a hyper-competitive hospitality market, Soffer’s push for a 99-foot waterslide tower, which locals vigorously oppose, gets at the core of how the son wears his mantle of succession.
When Soffer left Turnberry, now solely helmed by sister Jackie Soffer, he wasn’t just walking away from a highly successful real estate family enterprise. He took the moment to reposition himself not so much as Donald Soffer’s heir but more as a casino and resort entrepreneur in his own right, putting himself to the test of carrying and expanding a multibillion-dollar real estate empire anchored by the two Fontainebleau hotels. He went beyond luxury condo and hotel development into owning and operating a private aviation company, marinas and a Broward County casino.
Then last fall, six years after the split, he filed plans to add the waterpark-style amenities to Fontainebleau Miami Beach, at 4441 Collins Avenue. Opponents organized, fearful that the amusements, open to the public, will attract more daily guests to the 1,504-room hotel and exacerbate traffic congestion and create an unruly environment in the city’s Mid-Beach neighborhood.
Fontainebleau Development partner and president Brett Mufson was surprised by the pushback, he said.
Faced with a possible defeat before the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board, Soffer and his team at Aventura-based Fontainebleau Development fought back. They turned to their Tallahassee lobbying firm, Corcoran Partners (not affiliated with The Corcoran Group), to ferry a new law through the State House and State Senate forcing cities to administratively approve variances and special exemptions for large destination resorts the size of Fontainebleau Miami Beach.
That he turned to the State Legislature to keep his renovation on track is emblematic of how Soffer operates. He can be aggressive and unmoved by resistance if it means he can keep his properties relevant in the highly competitive hospitality market.
“He’s a good risk taker, he’s got a good brand in Fontainebleau that he can expand on and he’s got a good eye for real estate.”
“I think over time, the community around us will realize that we would never build anything that would take away from what the [Fontainebleau Miami Beach] stands for,” Mufson added. “These are things that are going to keep us competitive, not just as a hotel and a large-scale resort, but also as a community and as a city.”
Friends and partners say Soffer has fostered his aura of being a daredevil in business, while holding onto his identity as a second-generation scion who has the dynastic cachet to firm up partnerships with other billionaire titans such as Richard LeFrak, David and Simon Reuben and Barry Sternlicht. Soffer declined to be interviewed for the story.
“Jeff’s had his ups and downs,” LeFrak told The Real Deal. “But he’s a good risk-taker, he’s got a good brand in Fontainebleau that he can expand on and he’s got a good eye for real estate.”
Soffer’s nightlife partner, David Grutman, is clear about what separates his partner from other real estate heirs in his world.
“I’ve seen so many people come from money and they’re fucking degenerates,” he said. “Jeff has done nothing but grow. He’s built his own legacy.”
Soffer’s Turnberry days
After spending the early part of his career building commercial properties in Pittsburgh, including the city’s Monroeville Mall, Donald Soffer moved his family to South Florida in the late 1960s. Donald Soffer and his partner Arthur Cohen paid $6 million for 785 acres of mostly swampland in northeast Miami-Dade County that the duo transformed into Aventura.
The Soffer patriarch also formed Turnberry, back then known as Turnberry Associates. The firm has developed condos, hotels and shopping centers throughout Aventura. By 1983, Donald Soffer and three other partners completed Aventura Mall, which last year was ranked the best mall in America by USA Today. Turnberry co-owns the mall with Simon Property Group.
In a December podcast hosted by Walker & Dunlop’s Willy Walker, Soffer said he shares his father’s real estate philosophy. “What my father instilled in me…if you build a good property, it will always be there,” Soffer said. “If you build it right and hold onto it over time, the value is going to be there.”
When Soffer turned 19 in 1989, he dropped out of the University of Miami to enter the family business. As part of his tutelage, he would accompany Donald Soffer to City National Bank, where his father had forged a relationship with the owner, billionaire Leonard Abess Jr. Soffer also became lifelong friends with Abess, who recognized that Donald’s children, Jackie and Jeffrey, shared their father’s ambition and were becoming titans in their own right.
“My early impression was that Jeff had tremendous drive and tremendous instincts, but he could use a conservative anchor to watch the speed limit for him,” Abess said. “I never saw him wanting to break out of his father’s shadow. Sure, they had disagreements. But I always saw them as close.”
In the late 1990s, Donald Soffer ceded most of Turnberry’s control to Jeff and Jackie. They led the firm as co-CEOs until 2019 when Soffer split to form Fontainebleau Development.
The breakup was billed as a friendly reorganization.
Jackie Soffer remained as Turnberry’s leader and the firm kept Aventura Mall, Town Center Aventura, Residence Inn by Marriott Aventura, Courtyard by Marriott Aventura, Courtyard by Marriott Orlando and Hampton Inn Aventura. Turnberry also remained as LeFrak Organization’s partner in SoLé Mia, a master planned community in North Miami.
Soffer took full control of Fontainebleau Miami Beach, JW Marriott Turnberry in Aventura and Turnberry Ocean Club. His firm bought a Hallandale Beach gambling site that is today known as The Big Easy Casino.
Turnberry and Fontainebleau remain partners in $1 billion worth of assets, including two Nashville hotels and Fontainebleau Aviation, a private jet company that operates hangars at Miami Opa-Locka Executive Airport.
Over time, Soffer built a reputation as the more aggressive, more hospitality-driven sibling, running condo development and later heading the push into major hotels.
Yachts and jets
As he ascended in the real estate industry, Soffer hasn’t shied away from the extravagant possessions of a billionaire. He owned Madsummer, a 311-foot-long superyacht that featured a cinema, a 12-meter-long swimming pool, a helipad and a seaplane hangar that converts into a dance floor. Soffer sold the vessel for $244 million in 2023, according to published reports.
Soffer’s affinity for private jets led to his foray into the world of aviation management. Fontainebleau Aviation, a partnership between Soffer’s firm and Skyservice Business Aviation, operates two private jet centers in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. The trappings have sometimes turned into long-lasting friendships with celebrities, including National Football League Hall of Famer Tom Brady and other one-percenters.
For instance, Las Vegas billionaire casino heir and former Ultimate Fighting Championship owner Lorenzo Fertitta’s friendship with Soffer goes back more than three decades, sparked by their shared love of high-speed boat racing in Miami’s “cigarette racing” scene. The pair met in their 20s and immediately connected, Fertitta recalled, describing Soffer as easygoing, approachable and unfailingly loyal. Even with years sometimes passing between conversations, he said, “It’s one of those friendships where nothing really ever changes.”
Fertitta also pointed to Soffer’s spontaneous generosity, recounting the time Soffer insisted on lending his private jet for Fertitta’s long-haul UFC trip to Abu Dhabi in the early 2010s. “That was just typical Jeff,” he said. “He didn’t need to do it, but he wanted me to try it out, like offering a friend to take his car for a spin.”
“There was no real history of residential towers in Las Vegas. He really was the visionary that really created that
market in Vegas.”
Along the way, some of Soffer’s personal life played out in the gossip pages. He was married three times, including an on-and-off-again union with model Elle Macpherson that lasted about seven years. They dated for two years, split in 2012, then got back together the same year, rekindling their relationship after an accident: Soffer was aboard his yacht’s helicopter when it crashed during a Bahamas trip, injuring Soffer and other passengers, and killing a friend, Lance Valdez. Valdez’s widow filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Soffer that was ultimately settled with a confidential agreement a decade later.
In 2024, Soffer married Colleen Schiff in a ceremony at Fontainebleau Las Vegas. He has three children from his first marriage.
Abess recently caught up with him at a United Way event in Miami honoring Donald Soffer. Jeff flew back from Las Vegas for it. “That’s the sensitive side that I don’t think people really see,” he said. “[He] will drop anything for his children, his family, his mom and his friends. Sometimes with all the glitz from the [Fontainebleau Miami Beach and Fontainebleau Las Vegas], people get the wrong opinion of him.”
Gambling on Las Vegas
Soffer’s most visible bet as an independent is 2,500 miles away from Aventura.
By the early 2000s, Soffer was looking to the next frontier for Turnberry. He found it in Las Vegas, buoyed by the city’s surging tourism and a yawning lack of true high-rise living.
“I was the first one to build really high-rise condominiums here in Las Vegas,” Soffer recalled during Willy Walker’s December podcast. “[There was] a niche in the market that people really wanted to live in Las Vegas… they wanted to be close to town.”
Soffer led Turnberry’s development of condo towers off the Las Vegas Strip, as well as a joint venture with MGM on the Residences at MGM Grand. Fertitta remembers that era as an inflection point.
“Previous to that, there was no real history of residential towers in Las Vegas,” Fertitta said. “He really was the visionary that really created that market in Vegas.”
That first wave of Vegas success emboldened Soffer’s next move: a mega-resort carrying the Fontainebleau name. But it would mark Soffer’s first major defeat. He lost the project when it was 70 percent completed due to banks pulling financing, forcing a bankruptcy. 18 years later, Soffer got a second shot when he reacquired the site from Witkoff.
Backed by Wall Street lenders including Lehman Brothers, the original Fontainebleau Las Vegas rose quickly on the north side of the Las Vegas strip before the 2008 financial crisis slammed the brakes. The project fell into distress, changed hands and became a symbol of excess and overreach — a blue glass skeleton looming over a battered Sin City.
“2008 was the 1,000-year flood,” Fertitta said. “I don’t think there was any city in America that got hurt worse than Las Vegas by the financial crisis and the mortgage issues. [Soffer] was in the middle of building the property when every bank just stopped funding. There was nothing you could do.”
Carl Icahn swooped in and acquired the unfinished resort in 2010 for about $150 million. He then sold it in 2017 for $600 million to New York developer Steve Witkoff, who planned to complete the project in 2022. But Witkoff shut down construction during the pandemic and the 25-acre site went back to Fontainebleau Development and Kansas-based Koch Real Estate Investments for $350 million via a bankruptcy sale. The partnership financed construction with a $2.2 billion loan, and the 9 million square foot project with 3,650 hotel rooms opened with a celebrity-studded celebration featuring Cher, Justin Timberlake and Tom Brady in 2023.
“As developers and hospitality entrepreneurs, it was a challenging thing to do. We got it open and things are going great,” Fontainebleau Development’s Mufson said.
New York developer LeFrak, who invested in the casino project after the SoLé Mia project, said he never doubted Soffer’s Vegas play. “I think there were some growing pains and there was a lot of skepticism in the beginning,” LeFrak said. “But there was no doubt even for a minute. As a matter of fact, there was an opportunity to put a little additional money into it, and we did.”
Fertitta sees the project as a throwback to when Las Vegas resorts weren’t owned by huge conglomerates.
“What I think Las Vegas lacks, particularly on the Strip, is an entrepreneur, somebody with a vision, somebody that is the actual owner,” he said. “Jeff’s a real entrepreneur and a real operator. You got to have a heart or soul, and you got to have that entrepreneurial gut to make these businesses work.”
The crown jewel in Miami Beach
Having an entrepreneurial gut doesn’t make the obstacles disappear.
Soffer has faced fiery backlash the past five months over a Miami Beach pool deck plan at Fontainebleau Miami Beach.
In one attack, an AI-generated video posted on an Instagram account, a cartoon Soffer is laughing and piloting a jet that flies over a map of Florida.
The plane drops a payload of cash, and a voiceover proclaims, “Miami Beach is under attack as Jeffrey Soffer schemes to buy his waterpark in Tallahassee…Now billionaire Jeffrey Soffer is turning to the heavy hand of Tallahassee, the state government, to override and strip all local control of Miami Beach.”
But Soffer has a solid shield. “He does not take it personally,” Mufson, Soffer’s partner, said.
Fontainebleau Miami Beach has long been the axis around which Soffer’s empire spins. In 2005, Turnberry paid $500 million for the then-faded landmark, designed by architect Morris Lapidus, and poured roughly $1 billion into a renovation that Soffer personally steered, from construction decisions to the tenant mix and nightlife. The overhaul produced not just a refreshed resort, but a modern hospitality engine. The hotel is home to LIV, the megaclub that nightlife operator Grutman built with Soffer, plus a lineup of restaurants and lounges that turned the property into a self-contained ecosystem. As Grutman puts it, guests “check in [and] don’t have to leave the resort.”
Grutman credits Soffer with giving him his first real shot at scale, backing a then-unproven model that fused corporate events and celebrity-driven parties inside a hotel nightclub. “He knew it’s about the content that you’re putting inside the box,” Grutman said. “We were building a bigger, better mousetrap.”
Grutman now runs an LIV outpost and restaurants Komodo and Papi Steak inside Fontainebleau Las Vegas, giving the casino a readymade nightlife spine.
The loyalty is also personal. “I feel like I’ll be partners with him for the rest of my life,” Grutman said. “We get each other, and when something goes wrong and I need someone who really has my back, I can rely on Jeff.”
Even some of Soffer’s fiercest critics on the waterpark fight concede that Fontainebleau Miami Beach bears his imprint. “I looked at Jeffrey Soffer as an extremely innovative and forward-thinking hospitality genius,” said Marc Weiss, a Miami Beach attorney who’s a leader of the anti-waterslides faction. “He really paid homage to the iconic Morris Lapidus legacy, really leaning into the luxury, the opulence, the grand entrances. He really seemed to embrace the history of the Fontainebleau.”
He thinks Soffer is forsaking that vision by “looking to squeeze and exploit the property for every dollar it has by selling day passes to a massive commercial waterpark monstrosity on our beachfront,” Weiss said.
Fontainebleau Development’s Mufson vehemently disagreed. “Jeff sees Fontainebleau Miami Beach as the crown jewel,” Mufson said. “It’s an irreplaceable asset that’s generational. It’s iconic from an architectural standpoint, from a design standpoint, from a history standpoint.”
For Mufson, that shared lore underscores how much of the company’s current reach traces back to one building. “It’s on the backbone of that building and its history that we were able to successfully open Vegas,” he said.
Mufson says Soffer doesn’t shy from dealing with minutiae. “But where he is most impactful is driving the overall vision and positioning of our company.”
If the waterpark plan seems to outsiders and opponents like a wild pitch to keep guests coming through the check-in desk, Soffer’s confidants see it as crystallizing Soffer’s pursuit for perfection, begun when he restored Fontainebleau Miami Beach’s luster two decades ago.
Then, the lobby kept its bow-tied staff and serpentine staircases, the black-and-white glamour photos of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, and other accouterments that made the Fontainebleau a backdrop for Miami Beach lore.
Abess recalled the moment when Lapidus’ son, Richard Lapidus, walked back into the reopened lobby and was so overcome with nostalgic pride that he hugged Soffer.
“Jeffrey had restored the Fontainebleau to what his father designed,” Abess said. “At the end of the day, the Turnberry style and the Fontainebleau style come from Don and Jeff. It comes from the top.”