Midtown's money man: the lead partner of one of Miami's largest residential real estate development project, Midtown Equities' Joe Cayre, has kept a low profile, until now

South Florida CEO, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Mike Seemuth

Joe Cayre is a rich businessman who got wealthier by developing a keen eye for opportunities unseen by other investors. Now, true to form, Cayre is trying to reshape the Miami metropolis where he spent his formative youth by building a 10-building real estate project called Midtown Miami--"a city within a city," as he describes it--on an overlooked 56-acre tract that other developers refused to touch.

Formerly known as the Buena Vista rail yard, the site is located just south of Inter-state 195 in Miami. When Cayre initially inspected the property, which had been an empty field used to store sea cargo containers, he recorded its blighted environs. "We took movies, and we saw people shooting up drugs there and sleeping on the ground there. It was a problem area and I saw that," Cayre recalled in a recent interview with SouthFloridaCEO at the sales office of Midtown Miami. "But I also saw what it could be."

Time will tell whether their investment in Miami pays off for Cayre and his partners in New York-based real estate investment firm Midtown Equities. The 56-acre site they bought is bordered on the north by Northeast 36th Street, the south by Northeast 29th Street, the west by Miami Avenue, and on the east by the Florida East Coast rail line. Over the next five to six years, Midtown Equities plans to develop $1 billion worth of homes, shops and restaurants on the land, which it bought in 2002 for about $34 million.

"A lot of people that I grew up with here thought I was very foolish and I overpaid dramatically for this property," says Cayre, who attended North Beach Elementary School, Northwest Junior High and Miami Beach High School. He remains unfazed, though. "Where can you buy 56 acres of land in the heart of a bustling city? I don't think anyplace in the United States today. To me, whatever price, it was cheap."

A co-investor of Cayre with local connections, Michael Samuel, moved from New York to Miami in 2002 and quickly brought the Buena Vista rail yard to Cayre's attention. Samuel became familiar with the rail yard during frequent trips to visit his parents at their Miami Beach residence before he moved to Miami. One potential plus was the site's visibility from I-195, the short connector highway between I-95 and Miami Beach, which runs along the northern border of the Midtown Miami site. Two handy entrance ramps to I-195 are near the site, all the better to serve its future residents.

Politically savvy from the get-go, Midtown Miami drew municipal support. The city government of Miami has been motivated to work with Cayre and his crew to develop a large tax base at the under-utilized rail yard, which in recent years stored cargo containers from the Port of Miami.

"It was overlooked," says Samuel, a self-described "control freak" who moved to Miami because "I have to be near my projects." Cayre shares that hands-on obsession, shuttling about every two weeks between his New York home and his Aventura condo to keep tabs on Midtown Miami's progress.

"I like to do things in towns where I live. It doesn't get away from you if you're right there all the time," Cayre says. "If you were doing a deal in Las Vegas, as nice as Las Vegas is, after going back and forth about 20 times, you'd start to tire, and you might not want to go as often."

Having an exciting job is part of what makes Cayre tick, a personality trait demonstrated early and often in his career. A few years after he graduated from Miami Beach High, he moved to New York and wound up making a fortune there in the entertainment business.

Through a friend who worked in management there, Cayre landed a job at Columbia Records International overseeing sales of Spanish-language music. Though he spoke Spanish, he was only 20 years old at the time. Cayre took to the business, and soon wound up running his own company, called Caytronics, which went on to become a leading Spanish-language record and music publishing company during the 1970s.

"I had the most successful Spanish [language] record company in the country. I sold that company to RCA Records for $125 million," he says. "It was a lot of money, so I retired." He was 39 years old.

The father of five did not retire for long. For three months: "I went to visit my children in school every day, and they got tired of seeing me," Cayre recalls. "They said, 'Daddy, don't come to school anymore. Other kids' daddies don't come as often as you do.' ... I just couldn't stay home every day. I ran around the world a couple of times, and that didn't do anything for me, either."

By the early 1980s, Cayre was getting ready to parlay his success in recorded music into a profitable video business, but was still looking for the right business model. He recalls a pivotal discovery about movies--not fresh releases but older, overlooked films--at a video trade show.

"I saw all of these great big-name video cassettes for $79.95. Then I saw this one big booth with John Wayne movies and all these other kinds of movies for $14.95," he says. Cayre asked the low-price booth tender to explain the dollar difference.