By Christiana Lilly
Fort Lauderdale beach is about to welcome a new kid to the block. And if anyone knows about it, it’s Peggy Olin Fucci.
Paramount Fort Lauderdale Beach, scheduled to open winter 2016, will be the first condo tower in the area that will not have a hotel component. Its neighbors will include luxury properties such as the Conrad, Hilton, W Fort Lauderdale and The Ritz-Carlton.
“A lot of people associate Fort Lauderdale as being second class to Miami,” says Olin Fucci, founder and CEO?of One World Properties, the real estate firm that’s leading the marketing initiatives for Paramount. “I’m looking forward to seeing the area changing, and Paramount is [a key factor in] bringing and establishing that.” Once home to a Howard Johnson, which was damaged during
Hurricane Wilma, the new uber-luxurious condo building will be 18 stories high and include a ground-floor restaurant with ocean views, a swimming pool and poolside bar, a fitness center, private “island” cabanas, a children’s play area and more.
The team behind the property—Arthur Falcone, Nitin Motwani and developer Daniel Kodsi—seeks to create a boutique style of living by opting for just 95 exceedingly spacious units. (The smallest, a two-bedroom space, is just shy of 2,500 square feet; the largest, a four-bedroom unit, is nearly double in size.) Prices start at a cool $1 million.
Olin Fucci, who calls Coral Ridge home, created One World Properties in 2008. Working with high-end real estate, she has sold properties in nine countries, a far cry coming from her humble beginnings in Peru.
The mother of three grew up when the Shining Path terrorist group was wreaking havoc. With danger surrounding her, Olin Fucci’s family sent her to Miami to live with her grandparents in 1992.
After working as a teller at Barnett Bank (later bought out by SunTrust), Olin Fucci got her real estate license, becoming a top agent in the area and selling multimillion-dollar properties. But then, the market crashed in 2008.
“That was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says. “There was the opportunity to sink or swim. I started saying, ‘Well, what’s selling in real estate?’” The answer: foreclosures.
She founded One World and sent her resume to banks to deal with their closing properties. She closed dozens of small transactions every month while others in the industry were struggling with a single high-end property. Fast-forward to today, the firm is a growing success; in the past two years, it has sold and closed more than 1,800 units, accounting for $1.25 billion in sales.
In Miami, high-end condos like the Paramount are the norm.
However, with prices skyrocketing, people are looking to Broward County, Olin Fucci says, where prices per square foot can be as little as half of what they are in the Magic City.
“Everything is going to be moving north. You’re going to see a lot more development happening of this nature in Fort Lauderdale,” she says. “People often go down to Miami to enjoy things that are not up here. Why not bring that type of lifestyle here?”
Originally appeared in the Fall 2014 issue.
