Alex Witkoff

Alex Witkoff is at the wheel of the family firm after his father, Steve Witkoff, joined the Trump administration earlier this year. The son is right at home in Miami.

Witkoff began the work of stewarding the Witkoff Group into the next generation a decade ago before rising to the level of co-CEO alongside his father, who founded the Manhattan-based company in the 1990s and established a Miami office shortly before the region’s COVID-era boom.

The company’s first major project in the region was the Hilton Cabana Miami Beach and New World Tower, now known as 100 Biscayne Tower. Witkoff is also working on The Shore Club Resort & Residences in Miami Beach, which will offer 49 beachfront homes and is about 90 percent sold out.

“Now we’ve come [to South Florida] in a much more forceful way — we’ve moved our headquarters to Miami in the Design District, we’re now quite active throughout Miami and Palm Beach County,” Witkoff said. “Our company has expanded beyond just real estate into tech as well. We have a big cryptocurrency platform called World Liberty Financial that we started in conjunction with the Trump family. We have a big golf course-based development business, Shell Bay, where we’re setting the highest membership rate in the country.”

The Witkoff Group, and many other developers are finding that condos are an attractive asset class in Miami considering that deposits on sales can help fund construction amid high interest rates and inflation.

While some investors have begun questioning the Florida market’s potential for continued growth — due to extreme weather driving up insurance rates — Witkoff sees political elements that offset those (literal) headwinds.

“The headwinds in other markets, in my opinion, remain taller than in South Florida,” Witkoff said. “Regulatory risk, to me, is almost impossible to invest around, and huge regulatory risks in markets like California and New York, where the government keeps passing legislation around rent control or things like that, increase cost pressure from a hotel perspective.”