Lessons - How I Turned Car Brands Into Billion Dollar Buildings | Gil Dezer - Miami's Luxury Real Estate King

In this lessons episode, discover how luxury car brands were brought into real estate to create unique, high-value properties, learn how a patented car elevator system redefined convenience, privacy, and exclusivity for residents, and understand the financial strategy that turned parking into a major revenue driver while pushing the boundaries of innovation in property development. What was the idea about bringing in, because Trump was sort of like a well-known real estate brand. Porsche, Armani, Bentley, these are not what well-known real estate brands, these are car brands, or these are luxury brands, car brands, but when you decided to do this strategy to bring in these names, what was the thought process? You had the idea of brand with Trump, but what was the next thing that made you want to do this? It was an evolution of thought process. So we started out with Porsche Design. You have to understand how I got to these car brands. It was difficult at the time. They didn't want anything to do with the real estate, but Porsche Design was the part of the Porsche company that did the sunglasses and the lighters, and they had the retail stores. So I went to the Porsche Design Company, and they were the ones looking to do a licensing, knowing that they had the name Porsche and the logo in their name, that they could maximize on their Porsche design. At the time, I believe the whole Porsche design part of the company was doing something like $80 million a year in revenues. It's small. It's very small. The tail of the whole Porsche company doing $9 billion a year. So easy to get to, easy to make a deal with, and we made a deal with them. It was the Porsche Design Tower. What had happened afterwards was Volkswagen did a leverage buyout on Porsche, and they took over the company, and they forced the sale of Porsche Design, which was owned half by Porsche the car company, half by the Porsche family. So they forced the Porsche family to sell out, and then I got tucked into the Volkswagen group, and that's how I got my way access to Bentley and all these other brands that we have that we've been talking about and so that's how that happens. They were okay. So the small subsidiary willing to realize that it was not easy. It was not easy. I had to convince them, I said, look, Donald Trump, the only thing he has is his name, and he gave it to me, right? He didn't have a product. He wasn't manufacturing cars or anything like that. These guys, you manufacture cars. You need a lifestyle component. We sat down with them. We really guided them through the process because a lot of the things that we taught them, you're dealing with executives who are not at the same level as our customer pool, if you will. So I represented the customer pool and said, this is what the customer wants. This is what they need. This is what they and they said, oh yeah, that's great, great, great. They didn't say no on me on anything. A few things, we had to stop production of our brochures because the brake calipers were not red. Things like that. They were obsessed with the details. For sure. They checked the building and everything else to make sure that, yeah, of course. That building is 100% Porsche. It smells, breathes, looks, everything, Porsche. And the same way Bentley is going to be the same. So the concept of the car elevator started. My father owns the building in New York City, which is a car dealership on 271th Avenue. It's called Manhattan Motor Cars. It's a Porsche Rolls-Royce Bentley dealership over there. And it's a five-story building. You drive in, you press one of five buttons on the elevator, goes up, opens the door, you drive right out. We said, okay, how cool is this going to be? Maybe instead of pressing a button, you will have an RFID, or we go to the fire department with a design, you drive in, it picks you up. They said, this is great, great, great, no fucking way. Because they said, we don't want you starting a car in the middle of the building. And so that was a whole other process of what is Porsche have to do with real estate. We said, let's make the building for the car lover, for the guy who wants his car and his living room. And that was what our idea was. What really happened was there was something I didn't think whatever of. But based on the fact that we have always South American customers, they love the fact that it was the security and the privacy and safety of them going up and down from an apartment without seeing anybody, without seeing, you know, with everybody know who they are. Instead of jumping on board and being like, and I know you probably have the patents and the IP lock down type. But instead of being like, okay, how do we replicate this? This is a really cool feature. This serves the same clientele as us. It's like the immediately, it's like the blockbuster to Netflix, right? Yeah, people are so slow. They're afraid of you evolve. They're afraid of new things. Yeah. And when they don't understand something, they're quick to say no. And if it was a little education, and especially to developers, I would have expected by now that developers would have figured this out what I'm doing, figured out that this is, you know, the whole reason we're sticking an $85 million elevator in a building, right? You understand why? Yeah, of course. Well, because it's a privacy, it's a convenient, it's a, it's a, it's a, you see, people don't get it. No, that's the abstract effect of it. But there's a financial reason. There's a financial reason I went and patented the shit. Yeah. What's the financial reason? The FAR, you understand real estate, you buy a specific plot of land. It has a floor area ratio, FAR in Europe, they call it GFA Gross Floor Area. The FAR on that site allows you to build in the case of the Bentley Tower, 600,000 square feet of net, sellable square feet. Okay, that is the actual inside of the apartments, not including the balconies, not including the stairs, not including the elevators, not including the parking. So by now placing the parking adjacent to the unit, yeah, I get it. I sell it as part of the unit and I'm picking up an additional 50% on the building. So my, my FAR was 600,000 square feet, I'm selling out 900,000 square feet. What does that turn into in writing? I'm picking up, I'm selling my square 50% more revenue than the neighbor on the same size plot, the same size land. And yes, it's cost of being an elevator, but 300,000 square feet. Yeah, but what do you do in the math? I'm doing it at 1,500 bucks a foot. That's an additional 450 million dollars in revenue. He spent 85 million for foot. Okay. Yeah. That's why that's where the, I mean, if you were to ever call me a genius, that's where the genius comes in. Because we figured out how to milk every single penny out of this building by adding value, by creating this elevator system. But every other developer gives away parking and I'm selling it at the same price per square foot as the unit. So it's an aha moment. And I am surprised at every other developer in the world is not calling me to do the same thing. I don't get it. I don't understand where the, but again, it's because it's something new. They're not used to it. Some others are trying, some others are trying to, you know, to do buildings where you drive in, drive out, which fire departments are going to shut them down on it. I'm the only system where you don't have to start the car. That's my patent. You come in with your passenger in the car. There's a little satellite system slides out, lift the car and use a little like chopsticks. The same way kind of like a tow truck gets the front. We do all four wheels. So the car is in park, passengers in the car, engine off, pulls you in the elevator, the deserverator, pulls you up to your floor, spits you out in your own personal garage, two steps away from your front door. And because two steps away from your front door, you have to buy that garage. And if you don't want to buy the garage, this building's not for you. You can go next door. Have you had pushback? Oh, yeah. Oh, you charged me for the garage. Yeah, well, it's part of your unit. You know, I mean, they don't charge me next door. Okay. That's, we don't have it. That's where you need to live. Go have some valleys, sweat in your car and bang the car up all day long. Yeah. If it's not important to you, you know, if it's not important to, if you really think about it and do the math again, I have, I'm selling four spaces. It comes to square footage wise, about two million bucks, not cheap yet. It's $500,000 of parking space, which if you go to any city, anywhere in the world and you want it to buy a parking space, that's the price. All right. And Hong Kong, they're going for two million. New York, they're going for a million. So to spend half a million dollars to have the car right there in front of you. How do you do something that's never been done before? So I know people that build technology software has never been done before. Building something physical that requires engineering architecture. It's like, it's not easy. There's a lot of it. It's expensive. It's time consuming. Well, I, I, here's what, here's what I, I gotta be honest and say, I didn't do anything that's never been done before. I just put components together in a way that's never been done before. Meaning what we took is automated parking. That's been around since the 70s. But never, it was always done to save space to put cars next to each other, save the driveways, you know, and make it a more efficient parking garage because garages are expensive. So I just took that same thing and adapted it in a way where we're, where I'm not looking to save space. I'm looking to bring a passenger in the car. So we had to put a lot of passenger safeties. And the answer is, yeah, I'm not an engineer, but we hired the right engineers who said, hey, how can we get closer to this and how can we get closer to this? And guys would pop in at a nowhere. And I didn't understand what they were doing, but later on became some of the most valuable guys in the whole project, you know, I'm the only elevator in the world with a sprinkler system in it. Should the car catch on fire, you know, there's a sprinkler system in a moving elevator with traveling. And so they, you know, at first we said, oh, we're going to have a traveling water cable. And they said, that's going to be a fucking problem. You can't do that. So, so we went to head to a high-miss system with these huge scuba tanks that sit on the cab and they missed out of fire. Yeah, I mean, but you just got to sit in the thing and figure it out. Everything's available today. Everything can be done today. You know, and if it can't be done, it's easy to make it today. 3D printers and whatnot. Anything can be made. Yeah, that's true. So it's very true. And like, listen, I don't know, you just never take no for an answer when it comes to innovation, it comes to building. I know, like, I, because I truly believe that there's always a solution, you know, and the really, those really, there's always a solution. You just got to think, you know, and sometimes I'm not in the position to think because I don't know the solution, but I got to, I sit there and I force my people to think. And I asked them questions of three-year-old childhood ask and get that juice is going to, you know, but why can't we do it this way? And why can't we do it that way? Even though I know that their answers are going to be, but what about this and what about that and what about this and what about that? And just force experts who, their experts, they've been doing this their whole life, you know, force them to think, you know, force them to think the other way. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.