Feature - Big Wheel
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hen People magazine profiled Michael Dezer ’68 back in 1988, it characterized him as a “self-made, no-nonsense guy” who “made millions in real estate.” It also noted that he had a thing for vintage cars, with a collection of more than 300 of them. Twenty-five years later, Dezer may still be a selfmade, no-nonsense guy, but his car collection has long since surpassed 300. Today it numbers more than 1,200 vehicles, and includes bicycles, motor bikes, boats, helicopters, and even a submarine and Soviet tank. Much of it is housed in Dezer’s own auto museum in North Miami. There, visitors can see familiar vehicles from movies and TV shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard, The Beverly Hillbillies, Miami Vice, Ghostbusters, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Munsters, and Back to the Future. His James Bond collection alone numbers more than 46 vehicles, and Batman is represented with enough vehicles to stock several Batcaves, including a classic 1966 Batmobile. The man with the keys to all those cars was born in Israel and came to the U.S. in the early 1960s. He enrolled as an evening student at Pace not long thereafter and graduated in 1968 with a BBA in Marketing. “If it wasn’t for Pace I would never have been able to finish my degree at such a rapid pace,” he recalls. “I did 17 credits a semester, and I had a fulltime job and a wife.”
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Degree in hand, Dezer went into the advertising and direct marketing business, but soon had an epiphany. “In the mid-’70s I saw that real estate is a much better business than marketing,” he recalls. “So I sold that business and I went 100 percent into the development of lofts. I bought 35 buildings at the time, starting at $200,000 apiece. Today we’re still the largest landowner in Chelsea.” Dezer is credited as a major force in the neighborhood’s renaissance, and his office space holdings there now total more than 1 million square feet. In the mid-’80s Dezer expanded to Las Vegas and then to Miami, where his holdings included a portfolio of 11 hotel properties that are being converted into luxury condominium towers on the beaches of sunny Miami. The latest project for Dezer Development, which he founded, and which his son, Gil, now serves as president, is the Porsche Design Tower Miami, in Sunny Isles Beach, just north of Miami Beach. In what may be its most talked-about feature, residents of the 60-story luxury tower will enjoy the world’s first personal car elevator, bringing them directly to their living units. As Dezer looks forward to other real estate projects, he also looks back fondly on his time at Pace, where he will return in May to receive an honorary doctorate of commercial science during the undergraduate Commencement ceremony at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. “Pace was very helpful to me,” he says. “The teachers were very nice, they understood that we were working guys. And P.S.—Pace alumni can always get the best deals on my office buildings in Manhattan and my hotels in Miami!” n