Real estate has always been a family business, with fortunes built by generations of investments, developments and dealmaking.
Earlier this year, The Real Deal highlighted its Top 100 South Florida real estate players, many of whom hail from multi-generational dynastic businesses with a lock on their market niches.
Here’s a look at some of the powerful families featured on this year’s list:
The Pérez family is Miami condo royalty. Led by patriarch Jorge Pérez, the billionaire founder of Related Group, his sons Jon Paul and Nicholas Pérez oversee one of the most active development pipelines in the region. Their planned condos include Six Fisher Island, The St. Regis Residences, Miami, the Ritz-Carlton Residences, West Palm Beach and Rosewood Residences in Hillsboro Beach.
When asked about the challenges of working with family in his interview for TRD’s The Closing last year, Jon Paul Pérez said, “You never separate family from business. Sometimes you have disagreements in the office but then you have to go sit in the family dinner or spend Sundays together.”
The Cervera family’s Cervera Real Estate made its reputation as the early sales partner to the Pérezs’ Related. Founded by Alicia Cervera and her husband Javier Cervera in 1969, generations of Cerveras have sold new development condo towers rising along the Miami skyline. Today, the brokerage is led by the second generation, sisters Alicia Cervera Lamadrid and Veronica Cervera Goeseke.
In the case of the Soffer family’s Turnberry, it is also a second generation daughter at the head of the firm. Jackie Soffer, whose father Don Soffer founded Turnberry in 1967, has worked for the family business since 1989 and is today its CEO. Don Soffer passed the reins to her and her brother, Jeff Soffer, in the 1990s, and the two led Turnberry together for more than 20 years. In 2019, he split from the company, bringing a few key properties with him to form Fontainebleau Development, fashioning himself as a casino and lifestyle mogul. He opened the Fontainebleau Las Vegas in 2023, but his efforts to add gambling to the iconic Miami Beach resort that originated the name have thus far failed.
In 2015, two of South Florida’s real estate dynasties joined forces when Jackie Soffer married Craig Robins, the son of Miami Beach developer Jerry Robins. Craig Robins founded his own real estate development firm Dacra in 1987, and began buying up sites to transform a Miami neighborhood into the Design District. It is today one of the premier retail destinations in South Florida, known for luxury shopping, art, and a growing pipeline of residential projects.