With an Italian Flare

The Entrepreneurial Tale of the Calta Group

On any given day, if it’s lunch time, you’ll probably find the Caltagirone brothers at Tullio, the fine dining Italian restaurant just off Ponce opposite the Barnes and Nobles parking lot. They rarely sit alone, usually joined by clients or by friends and family.

“This is one of the few places we’ll eat in Coral Gables,” says Ignazio, the older of the two brothers. “We’re Italian after all. We have to have good food.

That is not Ignazio and Gaetano’s only obsession with Italy. In the high-end homes they have built in Coral Gables and throughout Miami-Dade’s posher zip codes, they insist that everything come from Italy, right down to the handles on the doors, which they consider essential to meet the high-end tastes of their buyers.

The Calta Group is the name the Caltagirone brothers gave their company, which operates from its Gables headquarters down the street from Tullio, just past Christy’s steak house. Here, at two separate offices, they plot the investments that have taken their company from a rental management firm to the builders of more than 25 homes, and now multifamily housing in west Miami-Dade and south Broward County.

While the Calta Group is flourishing – their modus operandi of building luxury spec homes could not have been better timed to coincide with the pandemic-rush of demand for South Florida housing – its success was neither easy nor overnight.

Life did begin with the proverbial silver spoon for the Caltagirone brothers. Their father was one of the most successful real estate developers in Italy, with a 50-year track record of building mostly in Rome, but also in Northern Italy, in Venice and Milan. “Our family name in Italy is renowned with real estate development,” says Gaetano. The family was so wealthy that their father was compelled to relocate them first to Paris and then to New York, to avoid the spate of kidnappings then prevalent by the Red Brigades. While being raised in New York, their father also purchased a home in Gables Estates, where the brothers’ penchant for the City Beautiful began.

Over the years, as terrorist activity in Italy declined, Ignazio and Gaetano began spending almost half of each year in Europe, eventually joining the family firm. Ignazio was tasked with running construction projects, while his younger brother (by four years), Gaetano, worked in sales and hotel management. At one point, Ignazio had 15 projects under his supervision while Gaetano was managing seven hotels.

At this point, the two brothers began to chafe under the control of their larger-than life father, one of three brothers who formed Italy’s Caltagirone Group; since its inception, the group has constructed some 800 buildings with a value of 15 billion euros, along with accumulating holdings in manufacturing,media, and hotels.

“The decision to leave the family business was a lifestyle choice,” says Gaetano. “We had faith in ourselves and wanted something different for ourselves and our families… We wanted to be happy and be able to make the decisions that we wanted to make for our lives.”

And so began their odyssey in 2007, which started with raising funds in Italy – which quickly disappeared in the wake of the financial collapse of the Lehman Brothers and the ensuing worldwide real estate meltdown. In Miami for a wedding in 2008, Gaetano took a look at the foreclosure market and told his brother, “I think there’s an opportunity here.” So, both moved to South Florida in 2008 and started investing in “little, little stuff ” in Hollywood and Hallandale, where they bought homes that cost between $50,000 and $70,000, upgrading them and renting them out. “We started buying these little homes and we built a little portfolio,” says Gaetano. “When we got to 10 homes, we wanted to buy more, but we didn’t have the cash.”

They took their portfolio to Banesco Bank for a refinancing package based on the total collateral. “They were the only bank that would work with us. We didn’t have a track record. We didn’t have any credit. We weren’t even American. So, imagine that for us; coming from Italy, where we could literally walk into a bank and be treated with the red carpet.” With the Banesco loan, the Caltagirone brothers built their portfolio to 30 homes, all for rent, “which was a nightmare to manage,” says Ignazio. “It’s not what we do.” In 2012, they sold their portfolio and used the money to buy land to build high-end, single-family homes. “That’s kind of how the adventure started,” says Gaetano.

“We had to reinvent ourselves too,” he adds, “because we had never done general contracting work directly, never the construction directly. We would always hire a general contractor in Italy to do the work… but in this case, in the homes, we realized there wasn’t enough money to hire a GC. We had to do it directly.” Fortunately, Ignazio had sufficient experience from managing construction projects in Italy.

At this point, the Caltagirone brothers bought three lots in South Miami for $1.2 million, and divided one into two lots, to build four homes. They went to Raul G. Valdes- Fauli (the now deceased son of former Coral Gables mayor Raul Valdes-Fauli) at Professional Bank. He lent them enough for one house, with all four lots as collateral. When that was built and sold, they went to Biscayne Bank and borrowed the money to build two more. “Once you know enough people and create a track record, then things move,” says Ignacio.

From there, it was one after the other, with both brothers moving into Coral Gables, where, years later, they built the home of architect Willy Bermello across the street from the Biltmore Hotel and then another across the street from the Biltmore, just finished.

More recently, the Calta Group has expanded into multi-family rental projects, a kind of return to their roots in Hollywood, Florida. There, they are finishing a 200-unit rental building, with two other Hollywood projects in the works, one with 100 and another with 150 units, both a year from breaking ground. At the same time, they are working on a 450-unit in the health district in Allapattah, followed by a 400-unit apartment building in northern Allapattah that Geatano says will “actually be really affordable.

Even with more than 1,000 units in their multi-family pipeline, the Calta brothers still take a special interest in the two dozen spec houses they’ve built in South Florida, taking personal pride in each one with no sign of being jaded. They are elated to describe the detailing, which, of course, carries a plethora of product from Italy.

One of their latest completions is an $8.9 million home which faces the quiet green space of the Gables’ historic Pinewood- Cocoplum Cemetery on Erwin Road. It’s selling for $1,100 a square foot, which is not outside the current valuation for a property of this quality. The hefty price tag reflects the size; at 15,000-square-feet, the interior space, with 11-foot ceilings, is beyond generous. The master bedroom, with his-and-hers showers in one gargantuan space, and his-and-hers Japanese toilets, has a walk-in closet the size of a squash court.

“The concept of this house is that it takes over most of the space. There’s no real yard. For some people that’s what they like; there’s less maintenance,” says Ignazio. “This is the modern style.” The brothers are betting, of course, that someone out there is going to like this very much. For a sense of outdoor space, the building – aptly named Villa Unica –wraps around a swimming pool on three sides, with one large ground floor space can be cut in half by glass walls so that half of it becomes an indoor/outdoor place for grilling.

“It’s the detailing that we are most proud of,” says Gaetano. Importantly, all of it is imported from Italy: the fixtures, the woodwork, the cabinetry, the kitchen appliances, it is imported from Italy: the fixtures, the woodwork, the cabinetry, the kitchen appliances, the bathroom vanities, even the doors. They are particularly proud of the front door, a 12-foot entrance that would not be out of place in a castle; it opens inward on a giant flexible hinge. Doors that open inward are typically not permitted in Miami-Dade. “We had to get special permission,” says Ignazio. “But you see this? It bolts on both sides, so it’s impervious.”

“The process is to find properties and locations that we think are desirable for people. But also trying to find locations where we think there’s potential,” says Gaetano. “Once we buy the property, we engage an architect to design with us together a home that will appeal to the general buyer. We’d never want to do something that is too particular, right? Because then you really narrow the market of what you’re trying to sell.” Once permits are pulled and bank financing is in place, the building process takes about a year.

The Calta Group is also expanding into a new niche in the Gables: the townhouse, a type of home that has been become almost mainstream since MG Developer launched its high-end Biltmore Square array of townhome rows near the city’s downtown. The Calta Group is building their first on Palermo Avenue, a block south of the Venetian Pool: 10 three-story townhomes at 5,000-square-feet each.

“It wasn’t easy to get to where we are today,” says Ignazio. “We were fortunate to grow up in a very privileged situation, from having that and then letting it go. It was a decision to go our own way, with a father not accepting that decision, and saying, ‘Okay, fine, but you are leaving with just the shirt on your back.’”

They did just that and succeeded. “As they say,” adds Gaetano, “It can happen only in America.”