Sarasota real estate investor wants more

Prominent Sarasota real estate investor and developer Henry Rodriguez wisely began to sell off the bulk of his holdings in 2005 and 2006.

Now he wants to get back in the market.

Rodriguez, whose projects include a Walmart Supercenter that revitalized an area of south Sarasota County, specifically plans to get back into commercial real estate — in a big way. His path back will be through Woodmere Capital Holdings and Woodmere Capital Management, funds he set up to purchase distressed commercial real estate properties on the Gulf Coast and the I-4 corridor. “These should provide better returns than a hedge fund,” Rodriguez tells Coffee Talk.

The fund will be run out of an office in the Northern Trust Building in downtown Sarasota. Rodriguez says he already has received soft commitments of $100 million for the fund, mostly from accredited investors and friends and family. He has hired a vice president of operations and a vice president of capital. He plans to bring on a chief financial officer by early June.

The fund's investment strategy includes four ways to acquire entities or an interest in holdings: through acquisitions of bank-owned properties; through bridge loans to other investors; by assisting on loan workouts with investors and banks; and by buying sour loans.

The fund will stick with the Florida properties, at least in the early stages. “There are a lot of deals out there,” says Rodriguez. “But you have to look at 20 or 30 before you find the right one.”

Rodriguez says it's an aggressive, but reasoned approach to what he says will be a gold rush in the commercial real estate marketplace after it hits bottom. “By all means this is a generational opportunity,” says Rodriguez. “Never in commercial real estate has there been a time like this.”

That time, says Rodriguez, stems from defaults and foreclosures that have swarmed the marketplace. Rodriguez believes the well-documented onslaught will continue for at least the next year. Plus, a return to a normal market, says Rodriguez, might be at least four years away.

A long-term strategy, though, is currently more important to Rodriguez than the timing of the market return. “Eventually, liquidity will come back into the marketplace,” says Rodriguez, “and those who were patient investors will be vindicated.”