After Andy Ansin’s father passed away in August 2020, the family’s media empire and vast real estate portfolio, including massive land holdings that had sat untouched for decades, were left to him.

One of the first things the now-third-generation CEO of Sunbeam Properties did was meet with developers to discuss building something ambitious on one of his family's big, idle sites.

Through those conversations, he discovered something about how he would approach leading the family business. Taking on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt or having to share control with an equity partner — both of which would have a heavy hand in project decision-making — was unfathomable.

Instead, the billionaire decided to dip into his family’s fortune to pay for the $1B first phase of Miramar Cove, with thousands of apartments, shops, restaurants and a 5.5-acre blue-water cove with a fountain on 125 acres in southwest Broward County.

Ansin said utilizing the inherited wealth allows him to have “the freedom to do what's right.”

“When you're building all-cash, there's no risk of losing the project,” he said in an interview last week. “You don't have a lender that's going to foreclose or say that there’s some form of actual or technical default. Really, what your risk is is what return are you going to get, and at what point in time?”

Ansin leads Sunbeam Television Corp., owner of local Fox and ABC affiliate WSVN-Channel 7 and two TV stations in Boston, and Sunbeam Properties, which has accumulated and developed a massive real estate portfolio across Florida, California and Indiana — both of which his grandfather founded in the 1950s.

With his developer hat on, the 62-year-old has taken the reins of two massive mixed-use developments in Miramar and North Bay Village, which he plans to self-finance through at least their first phases.

Ansin tapped Fort Lauderdale-based Stiles to lead the development of Miramar Cove on a fee basis, an agreement that allowed Sunbeam to keep control but have access to an experienced development and construction team, he said.

“Most developers, if you went to and asked them to do it on a fee, they wouldn't because they want the equity,” Ansin said. “Even if they did, they might not get their best team, where Stiles had both the development side and the construction side that they deliver, which meant we didn't have to staff up.”

Miramar Cove is set to rise on a site that Ansin’s grandfather purchased for $100 per acre in the late 1940s following World War II. It's on the cusp of the Broward and Miami-Dade county line and less than a 15-minute drive north of Hard Rock Stadium

The lot was originally intended to house the sixth phase of the 500-acre, 5M SF Miramar Park of Commerce, a warehouse and office campus next to Miramar Cove that the Ansin family has developed in phases since the 1980s. Ansin’s father, Edmund Ansin, previously entertained selling the site to a cruise line or an indoor water park, but nothing stuck.

Now, Sunbeam and Stiles are under construction on Miramar Cove’s first phase, which is planned to include 2,874 apartments, 400K SF of retail, dining and entertainment, 125K SF of office and a 185-key hotel surrounding a man-made cove by Blue Mar Basins, where visitors and residents will have access to recreational activities like swimming, rowboats and a water fountain show.

Foundation work is underway for the project’s two apartment buildings, referred to as MF1 and MF2, Ansin and Sunbeam Properties Executive Vice President of Development James Bry said in an interview at WSVN's North Bay Village office last week.

Greystar, the largest apartment manager in the U.S., will operate the multifamily buildings on behalf of Sunbeam, they said.

While Miramar Cove's plans call for a grocery store, a new supermarket would meet tough competition with three other grocers within a mile of the development. Ansin and Bry said they are considering nixing the idea and shrinking the amount of planned office space to replace it with a large movie theater.

The team is nearing a deal with an upscale American restaurant for its first restaurant lease, which Ansin and Bry expect to close next month. They declined to disclose the name of the eatery but said it would operate on a land lease and build its own space.

Ansin said landing two or three restaurant deals should draw more retailers to the development, which is being marketed by Sunbeam’s in-house team in collaboration with Colliers.

“They want to know that the restaurants are coming,” Ansin said. “They want to know that people are going to be there because the people generally won't just show up for retail. So, they need to know that traffic and that the quality of the customers that are coming to the restaurants aligns with their brands.”

Plans for the second phase are further down the line. Sunbeam wants to gauge how well the first phase fares and assess what residents and visitors may be missing before moving forward — whether that be larger units or more retail and dining concepts, Ansin said.

He hasn’t decided how Sunbeam would finance Phase 2 but said the company has several options, like waiting a few years for more accumulated cash from Sunbeam’s broadcasting and real estate, selling assets — though his family tends to avoid that — or bringing on debt or an equity partner, he said.

Miramar Cove isn’t the only massive project in the pipeline for Sunbeam Properties.

The developer first floated the idea of a 7.3M SF, mixed-use development on a nearly 13-acre site in North Bay Village, a tiny island in Biscayne Bay, in 2022.

Sunbeam proposed a 39-story mixed-use tower in February to lead the redevelopment of the site, with plans also for more residential, office, retail and hotel components. Ansin dubbed it the Isle of Dreams.

The 460-foot tower, which Ansin said Sunbeam plans to break ground on by the end of 2027, will consist of 243 apartments, roughly 30K SF of commercial space and more than 100K SF of indoor and outdoor residential amenities.

Isle of Dreams and Miramar Cove represent a new era for Sunbeam and are the opposite of what Ansin’s late father would have envisioned for the site.

“Big project, big problems,” Ansin said his father would say.

Even so, the challenge of pursuing a big project is what makes Ansin tick.

“Each generation, the older generation, thinks the next generation is not so smart and not doing the right thing, and hopefully it is,” Ansin said.

“I hope to do it another 20, 25 years,” he added. “I need to be doing something that I'm interested in. Just clipping rent from warehouses is nice, but it's not challenging.”