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

"He said these are public domain films. He said, 'I don't pay any money for them. I just buy the negatives because nobody owns the rights.' They fell into the public domain, either because the studios didn't renew their licenses or copyrights," Cayre says. He wondered exactly how much entertainment was in the public domain at that time. A lawyer friend referred him to another attorney in California.

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"I called up and found out there were 50,000 films and television shows in the public domain," he says, "and I decided to make that a business," which operated under the name GoodTimes Entertainment.

The start-up of GoodTimes led Cayre to a fateful meeting with Sam Walton, legendary founder of retail colossus Wal-Mart. Cayre's discussion with Walton about video sales promotion included a trip to a nearby Wal-Mart. "Sam asked me to jump in his truck and go to the store down the street," Cayre says. Once inside the store, Walton asked Cayre for his evaluation of its video department.

"I said, 'Mr. Walton, with all due respect, I have never seen anything so bad in my whole life.' I said, 'you have these things stacked up like a library shelf. I don't know if they're books or videos, and as a consumer, I wouldn't know what to buy or how to buy.'" Cayre went on to suggest the design for an improved floor-display fixture for videos, which Walton approved and ordered implemented on the spot. Then the real payoff came.

"We were the sole distributor of videos to Wal-Mart for 10 years, and I would say I did about $5 billion with Wal-Mart in that time frame," Cayre says. A lack of competition from major Hollywood studios helped. "Today, the studios all sell to Wal-Mart, but at that time, they couldn't sell them anything. The studios were very arrogant and didn't really know how to sell to them."

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After starting up GoodTimes Entertainment in 1984 and running it for most of the succeeding 10 years, Cayre finally cashed in his equity: "I just sold it in 2003 for $280 million," he says. And as he started to accumulate wealth from his entertainment business interests (including an independent disco record label called Salsoul Records, specializing in a mix of salsa and soul) Cayre also began to do some defensive investing. The idea of passively parking his surplus cash with a group of investment advisers held no appeal for him. Ever the active investor, Cayre looked to real estate acquisition and development.

Around the time he founded GoodTimes, Cayre had started diversifying his personal net worth by investing in real estate, initially with a partner in the Washington market. "I learned a lot from him. We currently still have about 5 million square feet there," Cayre says.

As the commercial real estate market nationwide went south during the late 1980s, a cold call led Cayre to invest in more than 100 properties that a big savings bank foreclosed on. "They said, 'Look, we have 111 buildings in Manhattan that are all under foreclosure and we'd like to sell the package to somebody.' I said, 'Well, come right over.' And I bought them"--with a helpful pile of incentives from the lending institution. "I think I paid 1 percent down, no interest for 5 years, no principal for 2 years. How could we go wrong?"