Built World Advisors Podcast: The Definitive Biography of the People Building Our Cities

Ben Hoffman & Felipe Azenha
  • 4.8 (21)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

The Built World Podcast is the premier biographical series and educational resource dedicated to the visionaries, risk-takers, and Institutional Operators shaping the landscape of Commercial Real Estate (CRE), Urbanism, and Property Development. Hosted by Felipe Azenha and Ben Hoffman, active Commercial Real Estate Brokers and Co-Founders of Built World Advisors in Miami, this show is more than a market update—it is a deep-dive exploration into the life stories, personal philosophies, and investment strategies of the industry’s most influential leaders. Each episode is a professional masterclass delivered through the lens of a personal history, uncovering the "good, the bad, and the ugly" of the entrepreneur’s journey from their first deal to their most iconic project. Conversations, Cocktails, and High-Level Banter We believe the best insights happen when the guard comes down. Our signature "Conversations & Cocktails" format creates a relaxed, inviting atmosphere where the banter is light, the humor is sharp, and the drinks are flowing. But don't let the cocktails fool you—the dialogue is profoundly intelligent, offering a tactical look at the Capital Stack, Asset Management, and Market Economics. It’s the kind of high-stakes "shop talk" you usually only hear in a private boardroom or a closed-door partner meeting. Virtually Every Asset Class Explored: While Felipe and Ben are specialists in the Miami Industrial and Warehouse sector, The Built World Podcast explores the entire spectrum of the built environment. We provide high-level analysis across virtually every asset class, including: Industrial & Logistics: From Small-Bay Industrial and Last-Mile Distribution to Flex Space and Cold Storage.Multifamily & Residential: High-rise luxury, Workforce Housing, and Build-to-Rent (BTR).Office & Mixed-Use: The evolution of the workplace and the rise of Live-Work-Play environments.Retail & Hospitality: The transformation of the High Street, boutique hotels, and experiential retail.Niche Assets: Self-storage, medical office buildings (MOB), and life sciences. What We Explore: If you are looking for an insider’s read on the South Florida Real Estate Market and national CRE Trends, we dive deep into: The Miami Market: Navigating the Miami Skyline, Wynwood, Brickell, Miami Beach and beyond. Capital Markets & Debt: Real-time perspectives on Cap Rates, interest rate impacts, GP/LP structures, and why veteran operators are moving off the sidelines.The Operator’s Playbook: A look at the "Operator" side of the business—scaling income, professionalizing property management, and building high-performance brokerage teams.PropTech & Innovation: How AI in Real Estate, advanced prospecting tools, and new construction technologies are redefining Placemaking. Our Guest List: We feature a "Who’s Who" of the built world, including: Real Estate Developers, Principals, Institutional Asset Managers, Capital Markets Brokers, Architects, Attorneys, and Urban Planners.  Who This Is For: Whether you are a seasoned Commercial Broker, an Active Investor looking for a Value-Add play, a student, or an entrepreneur obsessed with the future of our cities, this show offers a front-row seat to the minds redefining the built world.

  1. 8h ago

    Robert Wennett - President & Founder, UIA Management

    Robert Wennett grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, with a real estate attorney for a father and a mother who never went past high school, started her own residential brokerage when he was ten, and out-earned her husband two to one. "My father was definitely the intellect. My mother was the entrepreneur." He got discovered as a model and spent 1978 to 1985 in New York, working the job straight through Penn and then Columbia. "I knew it was a side hustle, and it was better than washing dishes or waiting tables." It also put him inside Studio 54 at its peak. "Everybody wanted to be together, and it was just like party central. You'd go to Studio 54, then you'd go to the Factory after." Then a very different New York. He securitized mortgages at Manufacturers Hanover, Chemical Bank and JP Morgan, spent nine years at Federal Realty growing it toward $2 billion, and in 1998 launched his own fund buying urban property in New York, Washington and Miami. He sold out ahead of the 2008 crash. Miami got him early. He bought at Portofino Towers in 1993, the first high rise going up on South Beach, because everyone he knew in New York was already coming down. In 2005 he bought an ugly bank building and the parking lot beside it on Lincoln Road. "I'm gonna put it all on the line. If I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it." He hired Herzog and de Meuron, refused partners who might dilute the design, and opened a parking garage in 2010 into the worst market in a generation, fully leased. It sold in 2017 for $283 million. Now he owns nine contiguous acres in Allapattah and is starting with a barbecue joint. "We need a draw to the neighborhood because nobody knew about Allapattah. People will travel anywhere for great brisket." He splits the year between Miami and Madrid, and he is candid about what Miami lost after COVID as rents climbed and the street life thinned. We drank Cuvée Rosé, which is the only correct pour for a man who was at Studio 54 when it mattered. Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

  2. Sep 7

    David Moret - Founder & Principal, Highline Real Estate Capital

    The Founder of Highline Real Estate Capital sat down with us over a glass of tequila to talk about his journey. He graduated cum laude from UM Law and practiced law before real estate pulled him away for good. A leasing job at CREC turned into twenty years, running acquisitions, serving as a court appointed receiver on millions of square feet of distress, and then walking away in 2016 to start over under his own name. Since then: a fund raised into the teeth of the rate shock, the Bank of America Plaza deal on Las Olas, the biggest Broward office trade in a decade, and a Doral office park turned Live Local apartment play. All from a guy who will tell you office is still a four-letter word on many investor's minds.  We poured Entremanos tequila and got the rest: the law career he left behind, the days on the road with the Dead, and the fly fishing he still makes time for. Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

  3. Aug 25

    Pat Bosch - Design Director & Principal, Perkins&Will

    This week the glasses held Christophe Mignon ADN, the stories went global, and our guest casually mentioned designing buildings in 18 countries like the rest of us mention brunch plans. Pat Bosch, Design Director and Principal of Perkins&Will's Miami studio, joined us for a conversation that starts in Havana and somehow ends up in Riyadh, Rio, and Accra before landing back home in Miami. Pat grew up the only child of two architects, spending her childhood in her mother's office and on construction sites with her father, then carried that inheritance through Puerto Rico, Columbia, ETH Zurich, and the New York studios of Richard Meier and Steven Holl. In 1996, in her early 30s, she bet everything on Miami and co-founded Perkins&Will's studio here with three people. Thirty years later it's one of the firm's most celebrated design hubs. We talk about designing the world's largest university for women in Saudi Arabia, building Africa's first LEED-certified hospital in Ghana with little more than smart passive design, and structuring an entire L'Oreal research center in Rio around bossa nova. We also get into her lifelong love affair with concrete, a material most people treat as a means to an end and Pat treats like poetry, from the cantilevered concrete of Miami Dade College to facades that somehow make the heaviest material on earth look weightless. And she explains the philosophy that runs through all of it: leave things better than you found them. Pour something with a little sparkle and press play. Pat builds in concrete, but this episode is pure Champagne. Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

  4. Aug 20

    Robert Given - Vice Chairman, CBRE

    This week we sit down with Robert Given, the most decorated multifamily and land broker South Florida has ever produced. Over 36 years he has closed more than a thousand projects, moved north of 300,000 apartment units, and been named the Daily Business Review's Deal Maker of the Year fifteen times. He is also the man who sold a single Miami acre for a hundred million dollars, still the record for the most expensive dirt in the city. But this is a biography show, so we go back way further than the deals. Robert takes us from his Tennessee roots to the mid-90s move that dropped him into a South Florida he would help build, through the come-up at Trammell Crow and Altman, the years at CBRE, the run at Cushman, and the 2023 move that brought his whole team back home. We get into mentors, low points, the ULI and University of Florida world, and why the Jack & Jill Center matters to him. We drank Russell's Reserve 13 Year, which is exactly the kind of bourbon you pour when the guest has a deal sheet this long. Aged, patient, and worth the wait, a lot like the career. Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

  5. Aug 12

    Matthew Vander Werff, Founding Partner, MVW Partners

    Long before Little River was landing on lists of the coolest neighborhoods on earth, Matthew Vander Werff was quietly buying it, nearly 80 properties at a time when the rest of Miami was still fighting over Wynwood. This week the Founding Principal of MVW Partners joins us to trace the whole journey: an Iowa upbringing, a detour through the film and hospitality worlds, a Columbia real estate degree earned at the worst possible moment in 2007, and the decade of patient assemblage that turned a forgotten industrial pocket north of the Design District into the epicenter of Miami culture. We get into the mechanics of buying a neighborhood without tipping off the market, his hand-picked approach to tenants, the $79.9 million deal with AJ Capital, and why he stayed on to keep running the place after selling the majority. Plus the restaurant bets that keep paying off, from Sunny's Steakhouse to Ogawa, the 10-seat omakase that brought a Michelin star to Little River, and building it all in partnership with his wife and co-founder, Ashley Abess. We poured a bottle of Samuel Billaud Les Grands Terroirs 2023 for this one, a Chablis with the kind of restraint and sense of place Matthew has spent a decade building into a neighborhood. It did not survive the episode. Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

  6. Aug 4

    Lee Brian Schrager, Founder - South Beach Wine & Food Festival

    Some guests build buildings. This one built an appetite for a whole city. Lee Brian Schrager sat down with us at Buró over Pimm's Cups and took us all the way back, to Massapequa, Long Island, where he was bagging Chinese takeout on weekend nights by the age of ten. His father had left the garment business, retired young, moved to Florida, and opened restaurants with his brother that, in Lee's own words, did everything wrong and lost a lot of money. Lee has spent a career doing the opposite. We got the whole arc: the Culinary Institute of America, opening Torpedo as one of the first bars in South Beach in the late 80s, and seventeen years at InterContinental Hotels, room service manager to VP. Then Southern Glazer's handed him a sleepy one-day FIU wine tasting in 2000, and he decided it could be something enormous. By 2002 it was the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, today a five-day, sixty-thousand-person event that has raised close to forty million dollars for FIU's Chaplin School. The part he's proudest of isn't the star power, it's the 1,200 students who work it every year. Thanks as always to Vinya for the cocktails and to Buró for podcast studio and coworking space. Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

  7. Jul 29

    Q2 2026 Market Update with Anthony Graziano & Juan Arias

    The quarterly market update is back, and this one had no shortage of material. Juan Arias, National Director of U.S. Industrial Analytics at CoStar Group, and Anthony Graziano, Chairman and CEO of Integra Realty Resources, returned to Buró with cocktails in hand to make sense of a quarter that gave everyone whiplash. We started where the whole world started this quarter: the Strait of Hormuz. Juan and Anthony walked us through what the oil shock actually did on the ground, from freight and logistics costs to the inflation spike that had the Fed talking hikes instead of cuts, and what the ceasefire cooldown means for the back half of the year. From there, the conversation turned to the two letters driving everything else: AI. The guys dug into whether the productivity story is real or just a really good pitch deck, and what the data center land grab means for industrial real estate, power, and the markets scrambling to feed it. When warehouses start competing with server farms for dirt and electricity, the math changes fast. Then we brought it home. South Florida's growth story is changing shape. Net migration has turned negative for the first time in memory, but the people leaving are being replaced by a smaller, much wealthier crowd. Juan and Anthony debated what a market gains and what it loses when the moving trucks head north and the billionaires fly south, and what that means for everyone building, buying, and leasing here. As always, we closed with predictions on the record, to be lovingly held against them next quarter. Thanks to Buró for the space, and to Vinya for the pours that kept the forecasts honest. The market may be uncertain, but the glasses were full. Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

  8. Jul 21

    Jose Gonzalez - President, GLC Real Estate

    Jose Gonzalez was supposed to be a lawyer. Then Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1992, and the entry-level job he'd taken at Miami-Dade's Building and Zoning Department to pay his way through FIU turned into a career. He learned construction and its regulatory side on his feet, in the middle of a region rebuilding itself. At 22, when most of his peers were collecting diplomas, Armando Codina recruited him to work on Dolphin Mall. He never really left that world. When Codina Group merged into Flagler in 2006, he stayed on under Florida East Coast Industries, eventually rising to Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, the person responsible for the parts of development nobody claps for: land use, zoning, environmental, traffic, and the government relationships that decide whether a project ever gets out of the ground. His biggest stage was Brightline, the privately built rail line connecting Miami and Orlando, alongside the industrial buildout through Flagler Global Logistics that reshaped South Florida's warehouse map. In this episode we go all the way back, family, upbringing, the version of Jose who thought he'd be arguing in front of juries instead of zoning boards. We get into what Andrew actually looked like on the ground, what Armando Codina saw in a 22-year-old, the low points he doesn't usually talk about, and what he thinks is genuinely broken about how Miami gets built. He also tells us what it means to have come full circle, back in the Codina orbit where the whole thing started. Recorded at Buró, where we do our best work and drink our best drinks. Thanks to Mike Feinstein for the room and to Nick Garcia and the Vinya team for the pour.  Connect with us Want to dive deeper into Miami’s commercial real estate scene? 📧 Get in touch: Built World Advisors🎙️ Listen & Watch: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube📱 Follow the show: LinkedIn | InstagramConnect with the Hosts: Felipe Azenha Ben Hoffman Our Partners & Sponsors 🏢 Studio Space: A special thank you to Büro coworking space for hosting us!  Proudly sponsored by: Top of Mind PRVizzdaVinya

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4.8
out of 5
21 Ratings

About

The Built World Podcast is the premier biographical series and educational resource dedicated to the visionaries, risk-takers, and Institutional Operators shaping the landscape of Commercial Real Estate (CRE), Urbanism, and Property Development. Hosted by Felipe Azenha and Ben Hoffman, active Commercial Real Estate Brokers and Co-Founders of Built World Advisors in Miami, this show is more than a market update—it is a deep-dive exploration into the life stories, personal philosophies, and investment strategies of the industry’s most influential leaders. Each episode is a professional masterclass delivered through the lens of a personal history, uncovering the "good, the bad, and the ugly" of the entrepreneur’s journey from their first deal to their most iconic project. Conversations, Cocktails, and High-Level Banter We believe the best insights happen when the guard comes down. Our signature "Conversations & Cocktails" format creates a relaxed, inviting atmosphere where the banter is light, the humor is sharp, and the drinks are flowing. But don't let the cocktails fool you—the dialogue is profoundly intelligent, offering a tactical look at the Capital Stack, Asset Management, and Market Economics. It’s the kind of high-stakes "shop talk" you usually only hear in a private boardroom or a closed-door partner meeting. Virtually Every Asset Class Explored: While Felipe and Ben are specialists in the Miami Industrial and Warehouse sector, The Built World Podcast explores the entire spectrum of the built environment. We provide high-level analysis across virtually every asset class, including: Industrial & Logistics: From Small-Bay Industrial and Last-Mile Distribution to Flex Space and Cold Storage.Multifamily & Residential: High-rise luxury, Workforce Housing, and Build-to-Rent (BTR).Office & Mixed-Use: The evolution of the workplace and the rise of Live-Work-Play environments.Retail & Hospitality: The transformation of the High Street, boutique hotels, and experiential retail.Niche Assets: Self-storage, medical office buildings (MOB), and life sciences. What We Explore: If you are looking for an insider’s read on the South Florida Real Estate Market and national CRE Trends, we dive deep into: The Miami Market: Navigating the Miami Skyline, Wynwood, Brickell, Miami Beach and beyond. Capital Markets & Debt: Real-time perspectives on Cap Rates, interest rate impacts, GP/LP structures, and why veteran operators are moving off the sidelines.The Operator’s Playbook: A look at the "Operator" side of the business—scaling income, professionalizing property management, and building high-performance brokerage teams.PropTech & Innovation: How AI in Real Estate, advanced prospecting tools, and new construction technologies are redefining Placemaking. Our Guest List: We feature a "Who’s Who" of the built world, including: Real Estate Developers, Principals, Institutional Asset Managers, Capital Markets Brokers, Architects, Attorneys, and Urban Planners.  Who This Is For: Whether you are a seasoned Commercial Broker, an Active Investor looking for a Value-Add play, a student, or an entrepreneur obsessed with the future of our cities, this show offers a front-row seat to the minds redefining the built world.

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