In 2015, Jon Paul “JP” Pérez saw an opportunity to develop the rental market in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. The
former industrial area had become a hip arts district, with the most foot traffic of any Miami neighborhood, but nobody was building high-rises there.
“You had to believe that you could get $3 a square foot, and people were scared of that number,” says Pérez, who was then a vice president at Miami-based Related Group, Florida’s largest developer and one of the country’s largest Hispanic-owned businesses. He started planning the first new vertical developments in the neighborhood and, in 2019, completed the Wynwood 25, an eight-story mixed-use project. He kept the rents down by making the 289 market-rate units slightly smaller, ranging from 487 square feet for a studio to 1,515 square feet for three bedrooms. The “very sexy-looking building,” as Pérez describes it, is getting an average rent of $3.55 per square foot. Under his guidance, the company has lined up projects in Wynwood that he estimates will cost a total of $1.5 billion to develop.
JON PAUL PÉREZ AT A GLANCE
Company: Related Group
Title: President
Age: 36
What do you love the most about your job? It’s very fulfilling to create something from nothing. Basically, you have a vision for a piece of land, and you end up building these buildings. And when it’s done, you can say, ‘I did that.’ It’s gratifying to create something that adds to the neighborhood.
Biggest misstep so far? Not buying a site in [the Miami neighborhood of] Coconut Grove. I brought it to the investment committee and was shut down. I should have pushed it through.
What should the government do in relation to housing? Provide more funding for affordable housing. There’s an unlimited demand for affordable workforce housing, and the only way to make it feasible is for the government to work with the private sector.
Thoughts on the Surfside condo collapse? I was in shock and disbelief. No one’s really sure what happened, but the code now is so stringent that I don’t see something like that happening again.
Favorite hobbies? I have too many: bike riding, quail hunting, tennis, boating.
What is the most salient aspect of Latino culture in your life? In Latino culture, the families are very close. Every Sunday, we have a barbecue at my dad’s house.
Favorite hangout? The new ZZ’s Sushi Bar, which has the best food and best ambiance in Miami.
In November 2020, Pérez became president of Related Group, taking over the day-to-day management from his father and founder, Jorge Pérez. And observers are bullish about the future. “I work with some of the nation’s most powerful developers, and I can confidently say that JP’s determination, tenacity, and genuine passion for his work is unmatched,” wrote Matthew Gorson, senior chairman of law firm Greenberg Traurig, in a letter of recommendation for MFE’s Executive of the Year award. “He is raising the bar for the next generation of leaders.”
Early Education
At age 36, Pérez may seem young to be running a company that currently has more than $13 billion under development and had $1.7 billion in revenue last year. But his education also started early. Five years before Pérez was born, his father switched from working as a city planner for Miami to becoming a developer of affordable housing. As a child, Pérez was immersed in real estate, touring rental properties after soccer games and going to three-hour lunches where business deals were discussed.
“[My father] never forced any of us to go into the business—he would just bring us around. He was very good at mixing family with business,” says Pérez, who is the eldest of three sons. “My goal was always to work my way up and continue the legacy of my father.”
He interned at Related Group throughout high school and college and anticipated he would jump right into a job there after getting a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Miami. But his father brought him up short, counseling him to gain some experience at New York’s Related Cos. (When the senior Pérez got his start, he became fast friends and business partners with Stephen Ross, the founder of Related Cos. The two companies are independent, but Related New York continues to have a passive minority interest in Related Florida.)
Starting out as an analyst, Pérez spent five years at Related Cos. learning what made a deal attractive to investors and getting “his MBA in real estate,” as he describes it. He was part of the team that raised $900 million to invest in distressed deals in the wake of the 2007 real estate collapse. One such deal was Oasis Fort Myers, a 425-unit condominium project that his father’s company had completed in 2008 and the lender foreclosed on. Related Cos. bought the debt from the lender, and Pérez helped to figure out how to unload the units via a combination of live auction and bulk sale.
In 2012, Pérez noticed that the condo market was picking up again back at home. After a hugely successful run building luxury condos in the decade before the market crash, Jorge Pérez had earned the nickname of “Condo King.”
“I saw that Related Florida had launched two new condo jobs, and I didn’t want to miss the next cycle,” says Pérez. Back in Miami, he began as a development manager in the company’s multifamily group and worked on market-rate rental projects, gaining experience in a sector that was new to him. He consequently took the lead on a condominium tower that would be one of Related Group’s most successful developments: fashion designer Giorgio Armani’s first residential project.
“[Armani] was infinitely involved in every single detail, and there was no such thing as value engineering in that project,” says Pérez. “It was a very difficult but fun job.” Residences by Armani/Casa has raised the bar for South Florida condo sales in the post-pandemic era, selling out its 308 units for nearly $1 billion.
Since the start of the pandemic, Pérez has responded to increased housing demand by fast-tracking multiple condominium projects and accelerating work on market-rate rentals and affordable housing projects. Notably, the company is redeveloping Liberty Square, Miami-Dade County’s largest public housing development, and will complete 600 affordable units there by the end of the year. It is also constructing the next phases of River Parc, a $1 billion, 2,500-unit mixed-income development in Miami.
In July, Related Group opened a regional office in Charlotte, North Carolina, as part of its continued expansion into multifamily. The company ranked No. 6 on the National Multifamily Housing Council’s 2021 Top 25 Developers list.
“Every year we have to recreate ourselves and fill the pipeline,” says Pérez. “I want Related to continue to be best in class. We pay great attention to detail and are very focused on design, so we usually end up getting higher rents and sales prices than our competitors.”
Pérez appears to have a lot in common with his father, who continues to serve as the firm’s chairman and CEO. “They share that desire to win—they want to have a shot at everything, at any deal they see come through. They’ll make smart business decisions, but they do not want to lose,” says Ben Gerber, Related Group’s senior vice president of finance, who has known the junior Pérez since he was a college intern and jokes that Pérez is “a new and improved version of Jorge.”
Says Gerber, “I think the core of the company will be the same, but we’ll be a more modern, progressive version of what we were before.”
