Heavily in debt, Carlos Justo plans to create billion-dollar real estate team
It’s the perfect Miami morning at Carlos Justo’s penthouse – warm and bright, with luxury yachts powering through the sparkling blue Atlantic Ocean some 30 stories below.
Mr Justo, a 53-year-old real estate agent, has been awake since 3.30am but he shows no sign of fatigue. His eyes scan back and forth, from the high rise condos, to the water, and back to the condos.
An assistant, sitting at a glass table with her back to the stunning view, is talking business. She wants to know whether he will receive any commissions or checks anytime soon.
‘Right now, we don’t have any money,’ Mr Justo says. He continues talking. Fast. Pacing back and forth, he gazes out the window.
‘There’s money to be made,’ he says, grinning. ‘I’m creating the team. I’m creating the billion-dollar real estate team.’
In fact, Mr Justo is US$20 million in debt. He is five months into a massive bankruptcy filing. The IRS is after him for US$6 million.
And yet, he dreams.
A Cuban immigrant who came to the United States with nothing, Mr Justo’s is a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, a peculiarly American dream.
Once, he starred on the TLC network programme Million Dollar Agents. There was a time when he appeared in social columns for brokering real estate deals for one-name celebrities such as J-Lo, Shaq, Versace, and two-name notables such as Gloria Estefan, Sylvester Stallone, Rosie O’Donnell.
Like so many of our modern titans – think Donald Trump – he inspires both admiration and contempt. Greed, he acknowledges, fuelled his rise. Hubris ensured his fall.
Next time, he says, it will all be different.
Living among the wealthy didn’t come naturally to Mr Justo; he was born in Cuba, and as a child, lived without electricity, running water or plumbing.
His family came to Miami in 1967 when he was 11. He got his GED at night school but by the time he was 19, Mr Justo had learned English and bought his first home – a modest, stucco triplex – for US$20,000 with money he made as a janitor.
For the man who grew up with so little, talking about homes came easily. So he got his real estate licence. Early on, he targeted the top end of Miami’s real estate market, the places most folks see on TV: mansions accessorised with palm trees, sugar-sand beaches and turquoise waters.
In 2000, he brokered the US$19 million sale of the area’s most famous home, the Ocean Drive mansion where fashion designer Gianni Versace was killed.
Mr Justo’s success was astronomical, the product of his aggressive enthusiasm, uncanny knowledge of the ultra-rich and a phenomenal real estate market.
In 2005, Mr Justo was worth US$20 million. He and the agents who worked for him sold US$200 million in real estate in a single year. He was also the owner of 12 multi-million dollar estates in the county’s most exclusive enclaves; he intended to eventually flip them and make a profit. Mr Justo and his business partner, Irving Padron, were awarded a prestigious Sotheby’s franchise and opened its offices in one of the few historic mansions in downtown Miami.
His strategy seemed like a sure thing in a city filled with speculation.
Unlike most other brokers in Miami at the time, Mr Justo never dealt in new condominiums – he thought that they were too risky. In 2005, he was quoted in the Miami Herald as saying, ‘I refuse to sell condos; I think it’s irresponsible. They will end up falling on their asses.’
Those were the days when Americans were addicted to real estate.
It seemed like on every cable channel, there was a different programme featuring the nation’s collective obsession. Mr Justo was in the middle of it all; a promo for Million Dollar Agents described him as ‘the biggest fish in Miami’s shark-infested pool of real estate’. Crews filmed him racing maniacally around Miami, showing luxury homes by day (from a helicopter) and going to parties at night (in a chauffeured Rolls Royce). Cameras captured his unorthodox methods of doing business: using a lunar calendar to plan deals, going barefoot during meetings, meditating with his sales team.
Mr Justo was a natural on TV, with his amber eyes, bald head and perpetual tan. His custom-made, silk suits – white or black or occasionally red – looked suspiciously like pyjamas, which he wore to closings and clubs alike.
Mr Justo spent US$1,000 on sushi lunches, US$3,000 a month on life coaching. He didn’t accumulate many things – he enjoyed sparsely decorated, all-white furniture and rooms – and freely let his friends stay in the various homes that he owned.
Mr Justo says that during those years, he ‘wasn’t operating out of integrity’ – and that many of the people surrounding him weren’t, either. Greed and ego were his motivation. He took advice, he says, from the wrong people and didn’t pay attention to details.
He also didn’t make many friends, says Kevin Tomlinson, a real estate blogger and Miami Beach agent who says that Mr Justo stole one of his clients in the late 1990s.
‘When I got into the business, he was the king. He was the legend that everybody looked and aspired to be,’ Mr Tomlinson said.
‘But over the years, his reputation within the broker industry is a mixture of people being afraid or intimidated by him and his success or downright loathing.’
Mr Justo took out mortgages he couldn’t afford, tapped into equity, splurged with credit cards. He didn’t diversify his portfolio and didn’t save a penny.
‘I knew the market was going to crash,’ he said. ‘It was irresponsible what we did, what all of us did, in the United States.
On Feb 13 this year, a clerk at the federal court in Miami stamped ‘RECEIVED’ on Mr Justo’s bankruptcy filing.
For three years, Mr Justo had tried to avoid filing Chapter 7, even borrowing US$15,000 from his 85-year-old mother and US$75,000 from his 83-year-old aunt to pay his monthly debts. But he was underwater on too many mortgages. There were other creditors, too, including the IRS, which claimed that he should have filed his taxes in the United States, not in the US Virgin Islands, which Mr Justo says is his principal residence.
He was named in two lawsuits, one filed by a former real estate agent who worked for his team, and another by Mr Padron, his former business partner. Both sought hundreds of thousands of dollars, alleging that Mr Justo didn’t pay commissions on various deals.
Mr Justo had no savings, no stocks and no bonds.
His checking account hit bottom at US$49.73. His financial picture was summed up in one dry sentence in the bankruptcy filing: ‘At the current time, the debtor has no income due to the state of the real estate market.’
That week, at the urging of a friend, Mr Justo had offered his penthouse as a crash pad to a group of travelling Buddhist monks from Tibet. As the monks chanted in an even baritone, Mr Justo’s mind reeled in turmoil.
‘What happens if everything is gone?’ he thought.
He wrote a US$3,000 check as a donation to the Buddhist monks. It bounced.
Sparked by a former co-worker, Mr Justo had studied New Age and Buddhist philosophy for years, visiting meditation retreats, spiritual centres and monasteries. But somehow, he said, the concepts of attachment and greed never really sank in until he went bankrupt.
It was the scariest thing he had ever done; scarier than meeting Fidel Castro twice in the mid 1990s, more daunting than coming out as a gay man to his parents.
‘Fear is not something I’m familiar with,’ he says.
It was scary, he said, because it forced him to confront the truth: He had failed. He had come close to bankruptcy before, always somehow pulling himself back from the brink by selling a property or getting a loan. There was no safety net this time, not in this economy.
When he first realised that he was about to lose everything, Mr Justo wondered whether it was better not to exist at all. It was the first time, he says, that he had ever considered suicide.
‘Then I thought, I’m alive, I love my life. I have my health. I don’t have cancer,’ he says. ‘I started to realise how little I need to really live.’
As he sheds mansions (five have already been taken by the bank, and it seems like the penthouse will be gone soon, as well) and possessions (he owns about US$6,000 worth of stuff, including furniture, clothing and, some Buddhist art), Mr Justo insists that material possessions mean nothing to him.
And if he manages to make money again, he insists he won’t be foolish with it.
‘I’m creating a real estate empire based on love,’ he says, adding that he plans to give large chunks of his cash away to charity – once he puts a million dollars each in the bank accounts of his mother and aunt.
‘In the past, I created my own hell. I needed to be brought to my knees,’ he says. ‘Whatever you believe, you create. Today, I live in a world with all possibilities.’
But for Mr Justo, those possibilities still include luxury. ‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I like being rich a lot better,’ he says.
He says that after he pays his family back, he wants a yacht. And maybe a personal chef.
Which begs the question: Has he really learned from his mistakes?
It’s 8.30am on a bright Miami morning and Mr Justo has assembled a dozen people in his penthouse. They sit in a circle facing the boss and drinking coffee.
Four of Mr Justo’s ‘Billion-Dollar Team’ are in attendance. One of his lawyers is there. So is his masseuse. And a banker who is foreclosing on the penthouse. There’s also an interior designer, a former client who owns a US$12 million estate and the architect who is designing Michael Jordan’s Florida home.
Mr Justo talks, non-stop, for nearly two hours. The message: He’s back and ready to sell. If he is afraid of the future – one in which he has to borrow money to pay his bankruptcy attorney, his cell phone bill and food – he’s not showing it. It seems as though Mr Justo is actually having fun talking about his troubles.
It’s Mr Justo’s acceptance of his failure that will propel him back to the top, his friends say.
‘I fully expect him to land on his feet,’ says Jeffrey Rubenstein, one of his lawyers. ‘He owns what has happened to him, In this day and age and particularly in Miami, that’s a very unusual thing.’
But his brother, Alex Justo, is worried.
‘To me, I don’t think my brother needs what he’s trying to build again,’ he said, thinking that his brother should focus on what he’s good at – selling – and not involve others in his success. ‘Forget about making this billion dollar whatever. There’s no other Realtor in town that does what my brother does. He’s a genius.’
Source : Business Times – 4 Aug 2009
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