Edgardo Defortuna.
Edgardo Defortuna
Founder, CEO and president at Fortune International Group
Edgardo Defortuna used a simple insight to become a player in Miami’s luxury condo market back in the 1980s: Latin American investors were snapping up properties, and they needed someone to guide them. Defortuna, who had relocated from Argentina to Miami, seized on a novel strategy.
“I saw the opportunity to target the Latin American market,” Defortuna told Commercial Observer in 2023. “Nobody was really focused on it at the time. I realized that people from South America weren’t properly served. I teamed up with lawyers and bankers to make the purchase and selection easy for them and structure it the right way.”
Defortuna, who had trained as an engineer in Argentina, went all in on luxury real estate, building his firm into one of the largest and best-known condo sales brokerages in South Florida.
These days, Defortuna has shifted gears and is focused on developing some of the poshest condo towers in the Magic City. In one splashy example, he hopes to build an 81-story tower at 1414 Brickell Avenue. He has proposed a project with 560 residential units, an 84-room hotel and office space. Rising 1,010 feet, it would be a rare supertall in the region.
Fortune International already is one the most prominent builders of condos in the Miami area. Its portfolio includes the 57-story Jade Signature condominium in Sunny Isles Beach and branded lifestyle projects with St. Regis and Ritz-Carlton. And Defortuna is working on Ora by Casa Tua, a proposed office and condo tower on Brickell Avenue that’s expected to reach a height of 930 feet.
