‘Queen of the Miami River’
Moves to Coconut Grove to build next stage of real estate career
One of Miami’s few female real estate developers charts new territory, by making a recent move that brings her full circle in her career and sets her up, she thinks, to build a new Miami.
Neology Life Development Group CEO Lissette Calderon, 49, relocated her company to Coconut Grove. She found a Bayshore Drive office for her team of 20 employees that’s three times the size of her company’s former home on the Miami River. It’s the right size, she said, to add 10 more people to her team, before the end of the year, in preparation for developments in the pipeline.
It’s an important move for the woman dubbed “Queen of the Miami River,” for blazing a development trail along the 5.5-mile waterfront running between the Miami Canal at Miami International Airport to Biscayne Bay.
Neology built nine projects along the Miami River and Allapattah.
The firm holds an apartment and condominium portfolio worth $2 billion, including 2,000 condo homes sold and 1,200 apartment rentals. Two apartment buildings are slated to open in 2024, Fourteen Allapattah Residences and The Julia.
Another 1,350 apartments are planned for seven acres at 2301 NW 33rd Ave. And there will be Calderon’s first development outside of South Florida, at a site in Central Florida she didn’t want to disclose at this point.
“I hope to always be the Queen of the Miami River, because the Miami River is near and dear to my heart,” Calderon said in an interview in her company digs. “Our projects are just not on the river anymore. We’ve expanded.”
It just so happens Calderon’s Coconut Grove office is in the same building, where she started her career a couple decades ago at Terremark. The real estateturned-technology company once occupied the penthouse floor in the building.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Cuban American Calderon was the first in her family to attend college. Born the child of
Cuban immigrants, Calderon and her younger brother, Ralph Calderon, are the first generation of Americans after her parents fled communism in the 1960s.
Always good with numbers, Calderon got her career start as an investment banking analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York in its merchant banking division, after graduating college in 1996. She returned to Miami for good a few years later.
Her father, who died weeks before she graduated from Coral Gables High School in 1992, inspired Calderon’s real estate career through his construction business.
“My dad was my idol. My dad was everything. I would go on Saturdays with him to these job sites,” she recalled. “We would always talk about one day, dad we would do this together.”
Calderon ensures her three daughters — Mia