Drive across Miami and you will pass Related Group buildings you would never place in the same portfolio. A workforce apartment block near the river. A rental tower in Edgewater. A glass condominium on Biscayne Bay with a hotel brand on the door. Same company. Five decades. One habit running through all of it.
Key Takeaways
- —Related Group builds across the full range of the housing market — workforce and affordable rental, market-rate rental, commercial, and luxury condominium
- —The workforce and affordable portfolio runs as its own business with its own teams, not as a thinner version of the luxury one
- —130,000+ units delivered, 17 million square feet developed, and over $50 billion sold
- —That range and that volume are what earn a developer its lenders, its contractors, and its brand partners
- —The three Mexico developments are the visible edge of a far wider practice
The buildings you would not guess
Jorge Pérez did not start in luxury. Related Group began in 1979 building affordable housing, and it never stopped — that work runs today as Related Urban Development Group, with its own teams, its own financing, and its own pipeline. Alongside it sit luxury rentals through Related Development, retail and office and hotel, and the luxury condominium towers most people know the name from. It is an unusually wide practice for a company operating at this level, and the width is not incidental.
Two businesses, one habit
Workforce housing is unforgiving arithmetic. Every square metre has to justify itself, every delay costs, and there is no room in the budget to solve a problem by spending more. A company that has spent nearly half a century making those numbers work builds a reflex for sequencing, procurement, and finishing on time. That reflex does not switch off when the budget gets larger. It is the same discipline, pointed at better materials.
What volume actually buys
130,000+ units delivered. Seventeen million square feet developed. Over $50 billion sold. Those figures are worth reading for what they buy rather than what they total: a developer at that scale gets the contractor it wants, the crew it wants, and the supplier who picks up first. Small developers wait their turn for all of that. Large ones set the schedule.
Why it matters standing in Mexico
Pre-construction asks you to look at a rendering and decide whether the company showing it to you will turn it into a building. The answer is rarely in the rendering. It is in what else that company has built, for whom, and how often. On that question, Related arrives in Mexico with nearly half a century of answer.
Two things you would not expect from a developer
The first is who they hand the drawings to. Related does not use an anonymous house architect; the buildings are credited to named practices and named designers — Arquitectonica, Piero Lissoni, Sofía Aspe — and the hotel operators they build with are chosen the same way. That roster is worth its own piece, and it has one: Related Group's world-renowned partners.
The second is the art. Museum-quality work runs through the common areas of all three Mexican developments, chosen by a curator Related employs and drawn from the collection behind Miami's own museum of contemporary art — the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) carries the founder's name. What that means for the building you would live in is covered in Art as a development and lifestyle philosophy.