The Condo Kings dig in: Phil Spiegelman and Craig Studnicky, the partners behind International Sales Group, have ridden the high-rise wave to become the kings of condo sales in South Florida. Here's how they did it - ISG - Cover Story

South Florida CEO, Feb, 2004 by Charles Flowers

The Condo Kings have arrived, only there are no maracas at this sales meeting, held in the ballroom of the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa on the beach in Hollywood. There are brokers by the dozen, well-dressed people with silent cell phones listening through headsets to translations in two languages. They sit raptly, watching a tennis player who is bald like Andre Agassi, only not as famous or as tongue-tied. Still, Ruben Perczek is dressed in shorts and sneakers, and he looks, well ... fabulous, like a player whose serve could hurt you. The brokers are hearing that success comes from being focused, from not taking your eye off the ball.

They are learning from a master motivator, who is not afraid to get personal. Perczek, now Dr. Perczek, director of the Perczek Performance Institute on Key Biscayne, says his dream was to make the Davis Cup team for his native Colombia. When he shows the audience a slide of an old friend and fellow tennis player, you get the idea that one of them was not going to make it, especially when Perczek admonishes the listeners to respect time and not waste it. Perczek made the team, and played in Bogota's biggest arena. His friend, unfortunately, did not. Tears are shed for this unknown player, who died in a car accident before he could watch his friend play in the big match.

When Perczek is done with his speech, which lasts the equivalent of a good three sets for Serena Williams, you cannot get to him through the ring of brokers who are there to learn--what was it? Oh yes, ways to sell more high-end condos. The Condo Kings have tapped another vein, one that flows from the heart.

"We started this ten years ago," says Craig Studnicky, 47, executive vice president of Aventura-based International Sales Group (ISG), and one of the Condo Kings. "We had been to a lot of sales meetings and had been bored to death. It couldn't be just, 'How do you like our kitchens and our floor plans and our views?' We knew we had to make it more ..."

"... So we could build relationships with these people so they would want to come to us to do business," interjects his tag-team fellow King, ISG CEO Philip Spiegelman, 53. "By associating ISG as a company where they could not only find the best properties, but to learn, to invigorate themselves, to be educated, to have the support ... That's what these people all want to participate in."

With that in mind, ISG holds each quarter what amounts to the most celebrated training seminar for condo salespeople in South Florida, joining locals with brokers flown in from all over Latin America, and infusing them with insights offered by motivational speakers, psychologists, even hypnotists, who have been known to illustrate the power of suggestion by transforming audience volunteers into barnyard animals.

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"We add [the sales seminars] to constantly make them better--" says Studnicky "--so that we can do more business," says Spiegelman, completing the sentence like half of a comfortably dysfunctional married couple, causing you to turn your head as if following a verbal tennis match, wondering, if only fleetingly, if these guys ever turn down the intensity.

>> TAKING THE HIGH-END COAST

The excitement of selling condos in South Florida has not paled for the Condo Kings over the past decade. In that time, Spiegelman and Studnicky have discovered and whittled a niche that fits the market perfectly, in the process becoming the top sales group for high-end, high-rise homes in South Florida. They currently represent a $4 billion inventory, with 2003 sales exceeding $435 million. That's up four-fold from five years ago; for 2004, the dynamic duo predicts that sales could crest $650 million.

The timing has been good for ISG. As domestic interest rates dipped to historic lows, they moved in with great financing. When corporate scandals and the uncertainty of a war with Iraq drove stock prices down, ISG was ready for investors who realized that buying South Florida real estate was possibly the best business move they could make.

They have been particularly keen in reaping sales from the Americas. As Latin American currencies fell against the dollar and buyers moved north to escape financial and then political instability, they extended their hands to reach more prospects. In addition to inviting Latin brokers to Miami, ISG sales teams flew sorties into Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico and the Dominican Republic--wherever buyers could be found--setting up private meetings and matching customers with brokers trained to tell the right story every time.

"This is the only company that has been doing this," says Fernando Valdivieso, ISG sales manager for two projects: the Hamptons South in Aventura and Biscayne Landing, the huge new development going up on Biscayne Bay in North Miami. "They have a great reputation."

Valdivieso, a Colombian native who reported 12 contracts at Biscayne Landing the third weekend its sales center was open in January, says that most of the current buyers are from South and Central America. The ratio of Latin buyers to locals has been growing fast, for political, economic and cultural reasons.