Simplify Your Life Without Compromise

“THE LONGER I LIVE,” the architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “the more beautiful life becomes.” Of course, sometimes life can use an assist. That is where the new Regency Parc ultra-luxury residential tower in the heart of Coral Gables comes in.

This instantly iconic miracle of design exudes the magnificence of a breathtaking Lake Cuomo villa and boasts 126 spacious “Sky Residences” ranging from 1,768 to 12,000 square feet. But it also includes a jaw-dropping array of amenities from five-star hotel-rivaling concierge services (black car transportation, dining reservations, in-unit housekeeping), round-the-clock security, a salon, and wellness pavilion to co-working spaces, a telehealth room, a movie theater, dedicated pet services, and many others. And, a state-of-the-art custom resident app makes accessing these services a breeze.

Regency Parc, in other words, redefines the word exclusive. (Just ask former Royal Caribbean CEO Richard Fain, who put his own Coral Gables estate on the market in April to lease a unit at the ultra-luxury tower.)

A NEW CHAPTER

And yet, this breathtaking building is more than a mere residential structure. It is an idea whose time has come, allowing forward-thinking, successful individuals to right-size rather than downsize their lives, choosing a path that allows them to leave behind maintenance costs as well as rising property taxes and insurance premiums while enhancing virtually every aspect of their lifestyle, join a vibrant and tight-knit community, and increase access to liquid assets. Or, as Regency Parc puts it on their website, “sell the single-family home, liberate the capital, and invest it.”

“We plan to see residents unlock $5 to $15 million in equity by selling their homes, investing that capital conservatively, and using the interest to pay their lease, travel freely, and live more fully,” legendary Miami real estate developer Armando Codina, for whom the $205 million Regency Parc is something of a career crown jewel, says. “It’s not just a home—it’s a lifestyle strategy.”

On the flipside, the lifestyle also works for out-of-town residents looking to quickly make South Florida home without compromising the ultra-luxury lifestyle they are accustomed to. “It’s the perfect place for New Yorkers and others to land in South Florida while assessing schools and other areas,” says Codina.

BEHIND REGENCY PARC

If you possess faith even the size of a mustard seed, the ancient parable teaches, you can move mountains.

Case in point: The incredible, inspiring life story of Armando Codina—a truly self-made man who arrived in this country from Cuba at age fourteen as an unaccompanied minor on one of the Operation Pedro Pan flights in the early 1960s that helped thousands of children escape a life of privation and oppression under Fidel Castro. Penniless and speaking no English, Codina endured a couple years in a New Jersey orphanage and foster homes until he could be reunited with his mother and relocate to Miami.

Armed with only a high school education and a desire to provide for his single mother, Codina scaled the workforce ladder, became a successful entrepreneur, then, finally, settled into a decades-long role as one of the most visionary pioneers in real estate development and life space enhancement South Florida has ever seen.

Yet Codina remains humble, his powerful faith still condensed despite the monumental scale of his creations and successes. “You know what my biggest accomplishment in this world is?” Codina asks. “I am blessed with four daughters and nine grandchildren—and they all live within two miles of me.” One of those daughters, Ana-Marie, he proudly notes, is CEO of Codina Partners. “It does not get better than that.” But surely Codina must see himself as someone with a preternaturally good sense of the market combined with a willingness to seize opportunity when it presents itself?

After a pause, Condina replies, at first, by noting that every boat he has owned has had the same name: What a Country!

“I see myself primarily as someone having been very, very lucky,” Codina says. “I am very lucky that Cuba was only 90 miles away from this country. I am lucky that my mother made the hard choice to send me here. I don’t think I could have accomplished what I have accomplished anywhere else in the world. Everything I have, I owe America. Even if I lived 100 years more, I could not repay the debt I owe this country.”

THE EARLY YEARS

“You have to follow your dreams, yes,” Codina advises. “But you cannot have a sense of entitlement. You cannot skip steps. You must work hard and pay your dues. There is no way around it. This is why when I started out, I always worked harder than anyone. Even if I was a bag boy—I put my all into it and treated everyone with respect along the way.”

Codina landed at a bank where he became fascinated by two things: Computers—then still a relatively new and evolving phenomenon—and the problems with account receivables that persistently bedeviled doctors. In 1970, he used the former to address the latter, founding a company called Professional Automated Services with an $80,000 Small Business Administration loan. It was a success, both financially and as a problem-solving enterprise. “I sold it in 1978 for what I thought was all the money in the world,” Codina chuckles. “Turns out it wasn’t—it just felt that way.”

In the aftermath, Codina thought he might run for political office, following in the footsteps of his father who had been a senator in pre-Castro Batista Cuba. To dip his toe in, he served as chairman of the George H.W. Bush primary campaign in South Florida in which Ronald Reagan would prevail. “During that year, I was cured of my interest in politics,” he says. “I saw the sacrifices it required of the Bush family and thought, ‘This is not for me.’ I didn’t have a home life with a mother and a father growing up, so I wanted to make sure that I got my own family right.”

The computer company sale had included a tough noncompete clause, so Codina found himself in need of a pivot. He stayed adjacent to the industry by investing in medical office buildings, developing the Baptist Medical Office buildings as the Codina Group. From there, in the mid-1980s, he developed Museum Tower, the first office building to be built in downtown Miami in two decades. Several more successes in this vein followed. Codina also gave back to the community during this time.

By the mid-eighties Codina had developed a keen enough of intuitive sense of the community that he felt the future was not in high-rise office buildings downtown, but closer to a trade port model. So, he began developing industrial parks—including, in 1989, Beacon Centre, a then-highly unorthodox 205-acre, mixed-use business park with incredible landscaping and retail space near Miami International Airport. More success came, and the concept went from pie-in-the-sky to conventional wisdom in short order. “Probably the best business decision that I ever made,” Codina says, “was not to let my ego lead me into building another office tower.”

Codina Group soon became Florida’s largest privately held real estate company. Flagship projects included the innovative 250-acre mixed-use Downtown Doral with offices, shops, restaurants, office space, 5000 rental units, green space, and a top-rated charter school. Codina also took time to give back working through the Miami Chamber of Commerce, rebuilding after Hurricane Andrew, co-founding the Community Partnership for the Homeless, serving on the Boards of AMR Corporation (American Airlines), General Motors, Bellsouth, and…the list goes on and on with many accompanying civic, corporate, and humanitarian awards dotting the landscape.

In 2006 Codina cut a deal to merge his company with Florida East Coast Industries—the company founded by legendary Sunshine State developer Henry Flagler—and attempted to retire. It didn’t take.

“I am a failure as a retired person,” he admits. When the crash came in 2008, Codina got back in the saddle, acquiring defaulted mortgages and properties, including the one which now houses his Codina Partners offices. “I have never followed the crowd,” Codina says.

And, like Robert Frost’s less travelled path, that has made all the difference.

THE VISIONARY IN CHIEF

Just as Codina intuitively understood when change was afoot in the real estate development game, so, too, did he come to recently realize his personal life had come to an inflection point: With his four daughters raised and launched in life, Codina and his wife found themselves ready for the next phase—one in which their space would more closely dovetail with their needs; where maintenance would become a thing of the past; where many, if not most, of their local interests would be within walking rather than driving distance; where they could live on a single floor without sacrificing comfort, roominess, or the highest of high-end luxuries.

Codina is, in other words, his own target client for the Regency Parc. “My daughter jokes that I decided where I wanted to live, designed my unit, and then built a building beneath it,” Codina, who has now put his large Gables Estates home, located on a street which he has resided at for 40 years, on the market, says. (Codina’s daughter Ana Marie will also be moving into the building, by the way.) “Fortunately, there are many others in the same boat, looking for the same things.”

All it took was a little faith, a lot of hard work, and that mountain was moved for (and by) Codina once again.

BY SHAWN MACOMBER