Ricardo Blas, COO, Resia

Invest: spoke with Ricardo Blas, chief operating officer of Resia, about the company’s strategic refocus on South Florida, the pressures shaping multifamily development and the long-term opportunity in workforce housing. “We believe that workforce housing families are underserved when it comes to quality and dignified locations where they can live,” Blas said.

How would you describe the past 12 months for Resia, and how does that reflect the state of the multifamily development and housing sector in South Florida?

Over the past year, we continued executing a turnaround process that began after our parent company, MRV, invested in Resia in 2020. MRV is a publicly traded Brazilian homebuilder and the largest homebuilder in Latin America. After that investment, Resia expanded outside South Florida into Texas and Georgia while continuing to grow in Miami.

From 2020 through today, we built several thousand units across those markets. What became clear in 2023 and especially in 2024 was that we would not be able to recycle capital at the speed we needed to keep growing in the same way. Higher interest rates and oversupply in some of those markets made the model much more challenging.

In Austin, for example, we delivered a multifamily project and saw tens of thousands of units come online in the market at roughly the same time. That affected values and forced us to sell below our original underwriting expectations. That experience reflected what many developers were facing across the Sun Belt: inflation, elevated rates and too much product coming to market at once.

As a result, we made the decision to shrink our footprint and focus only on South Florida. We are finishing the projects we still have out of state, and once those are sold, we will be fully concentrated here. That required difficult decisions, including reducing headcount and lowering expenses across the business. It was not easy, but it was necessary to protect the company and position it for the next phase.

What guided that strategic reset?

At the board level, we understood that in a challenging environment, you have to protect the business first. That means being straightforward with all stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, lenders, vendors, and residents. If you do not make adjustments when conditions change, you put the whole platform at risk.

The goal was not simply to cut back. The goal was to make sure the company could continue to thrive in a more disciplined way. We are still developing, still building, and still active, but at a reduced scale and with a much clearer geographic focus.

How is Resia evaluating new development opportunities in South Florida today?

Our decision to focus on South Florida is based on fundamentals we continue to believe in. The region is still attracting people, companies, and jobs. There is a strong migration pattern into the market, including qualified workers, and that supports long-term demand for housing.

South Florida is also different from places such as Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta. Land is much more constrained. Miami is essentially positioned between the ocean and the Everglades, so you do not have the same ability to keep spreading outward. That makes land more valuable, but it also means not every site is the right site.

The challenge is identifying land that can support a truly valuable multifamily asset. Some areas do not have enough job creation or strong enough surrounding fundamentals. Others are in transition and can become strong neighborhoods over time. The work is in finding those locations where there is real potential for transformation and where residents can have access to employment, schools, and services.

That is where we see opportunity. South Florida still has strong demand, but because land is limited, the ability to find and secure the right sites is what will differentiate successful developers.

Why has workforce housing become the core focus for Resia?

We believe that workforce housing families are underserved when it comes to quality and dignified locations where they can live. We are not focused on the high-end luxury segment, and we are not focused on the lowest-income segment. We are focused on the middle, where there is a large group of working families who need well-located housing but often have limited good options.

People want to live near their jobs. They want their children to go to good schools. They want to feel safe and be part of a neighborhood that offers quality of life. In many cases, those households are being squeezed because the market has not produced enough housing that is both attainable and well designed.

That creates a real opening for developers who can deliver quality product at a lower price point. For us, that is the segment with the strongest long-term demand and the clearest mission.

What trends are you seeing in demand for attainable and workforce housing, and how is Resia responding?

A large share of renters today are rent-burdened. Many households are paying well above what is considered a healthy portion of income toward rent. When that happens, families have less room for everything else they need in daily life.

Our response is based on the fact that Resia is a vertically integrated company. We buy land, develop, design, build, and manage our properties. Because we control more of the process internally, we can reduce costs in ways that many traditional developers cannot.

That efficiency allows us to produce units at a lower cost. If we can lower production costs, we can underwrite lower rents while still achieving the returns we need. That is one of the main ways we try to address affordability in a practical way.

We also approach design differently. We have developed smaller apartments that still offer strong quality, thoughtful design, and attractive amenities. Early on, that concept received pushback in some markets because the U.S. has traditionally favored larger units. But we were able to show that smaller, well-designed apartments can help lower rents and expand access without sacrificing the quality of the living experience.

These are not compromised products. They are new communities with amenities, good materials, and strong curb appeal. The idea is to create properties that are attainable, attractive and part of the neighborhood’s broader improvement.

How do you see the multifamily sector evolving in South Florida over the next three to five years?

Real estate cycles are long. From site acquisition to approvals, financing, construction, and lease-up, success depends on getting many moving pieces right over a period of years. That is why timing matters so much.

What we expect is that the market will absorb much of the inventory that has recently come online, including some of the oversupply seen in Florida. Given continued in-migration, job growth, and capital coming into the region, that inventory should be absorbed over time.

After that, we believe there could be a shortage of high-quality attainable multifamily housing for the workforce segment. Not for the ultrawealthy and not for the low-income segment, but for the broad middle of the market. That is why preparation now is so important.

Our focus today is on building the right land bank so that in two or three years we are in position to break ground on the next wave of projects. That means finding strong sites, working through approvals, and aligning the capital stack well in advance. That is the real art of development: identifying the land, convincing sellers, managing the timeline, and coordinating all the pieces so the project is ready when the market is.

That is what we are doing now. We are building a stronger land bank in South Florida so we can be ready for the next cycle and continue delivering the kind of workforce housing the region needs.