Codina Partners Part 12 - Armando Codina Explains How He Navigates Joint Venture Partnerships

October 11, 2018

There is an art to navigating joint venture partnerships, so EisnerAmper Real Estate Services Group Chair Ken Weissenberg chats with Codina Partners Executive Chairman Armando Codina and CEO Ana-Marie Codina Barlick about their approach to them.

Transcript

Ken Weissenberg: You've done a lot of projects on your own, you've also had partners, and you’ve also done public-private partnerships. when do you decide to bring in a partner financially and business-wise?

Armando Codina: So we'd never done public-private like Dora, I was all private. We built the city hall that is theirs, but we have done a large number of joint ventures partnerships. We did the first Beacon Center with the Tisch family. They owned the land, and they didn't want to sell. We ended up doing it they were the best partners that I've ever had- Larry and Bob Tisch. I think the essence of where we ended up is the following: we did projects like Beacon Lakes of a huge magnitude. A magnitude that even though we were successful, it's not a project that you could have written off a check. I take that very seriously and I take paying my debts- so we've never defaulted or were in a bank. I decided that we would do partnership with big institutions and turbocharge our returns so we always put a significant part of the money. In the case of Beacon Lakes it was like twenty percent A, and B just put eighty, but our returns were turbocharged so it was a way of controlling the fact that I wanted to sleep well and I didn't want to have to hand the project to a bank. I'd rather do with the project of that magnitude and I'd rather do diversified and do a number of them, always knowing that we would never walk away from the obligation. I had a CFO who used to come to us and ask why do we give away all of this, and I said because I need to sleep and because if we do two or three of these we will get better returns when everything is said and done. We have been lucky to have done deals with great institutional partners. We will continue to do that every place. The retail we're doing ourselves, the office buildings we're doing ourselves in Downtown Doral our headquarters were doing ourselves, we will soon pick a partner to do the industrial following the same philosophy of being prudent about our balance sheet and not get over levered.

KW: Leveraging your investments.

AC: And leveraging our know-how you have a waterfall so you improve your returns as they get their capital back at different levels and that's worked for us so we're not going to mess with it.

KW: Armando, Anna thank you so much for talking with me this morning. Your insights were just marvelous and I look forward to visiting Downtown Doral the next visit to Florida.

AC: We’d love to have you. You must do that.

About Kenneth Weissenberg

Kenneth Weissenberg CPA, Tax Partner in Real Estate Services, is experienced in tax saving strategies and negotiating sales and acquisitions. He represents owners of some of the most well-known real estate properties in New York City.

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