CLIENT NEWS: Alirio Torrealba revs up MG Developer’s South Florida pipeline
September 4, 2025When Alirio Torrealba got started in the real estate business in South Florida, he had neither experience in development nor proficiency in English. He somehow still led the wave of new townhome and condo development in Coral Gables, before expanding into multifamily.
Just a decade after its founding, his Coral Gables-based MG Developer is sitting on a project pipeline of more than $500 million, which stretches into Hialeah, Miami, Doral and North Bay Village.Torrealba has veered into a faster lane at the same time that South Florida’s real estate industry is experiencing headwinds. The multifamily and condo markets are cooling after several years of frenzied activity. Competition, especially in places like North Bay Village, is intense, and rising interest rates and construction costs have derailed several planned developments in greater Miami.
Torrealba, who can now speak English but is still more comfortable in his native tongue, knows he’ll face hurdles, and he’s figuring out how to pace his projects to reflect the possible downturn.
“There will come a point when we will slow down our growth, and stabilize what we have so that every project can cross the finish line,” Torrealba said during a recent interview at MG Developer’s headquarters.
Inside MG’s portfolio
When Matthew Baron was getting to know Alirio Torrealba in 2019, their meetings were like summits between world leaders who don’t speak the same language. But the two developers saw eye-to-eye about a multifamily project in South Florida they were partnering on, the first for both.
Torrealba, a Venezuelan-born builder who leads MG Developer, would deliver monologues in Spanish that his eldest son Diego or one of his attorneys would translate, Baron recalls.
“And I’d be like, ‘I was thinking the exact same thing,’” Baron said. “We really didn’t have an issue communicating. We both brought things to the table that the other one didn’t have.”
Earlier this year, Baron’s New York-based firm, Baron Property Group and MG Developer opened Metro Parc, a 10-story apartment building with 559 units in Hialeah, one of the largest new multifamily developments in the second-largest city in Miami-Dade County.
“We finished a month ahead of schedule,” Baron said. “We had about $1 million in contingency money left over.”
Co-developing Metro Parc allowed Torrealba, who spent most of his young adulthood running car dealerships, to step outside his comfort zone in Coral Gables, where MG Developer spent its early years of existence building townhome and boutique condo projects.
“Now MG Developer has large-scale rental development experience under [its] belt,” Baron said. “I think that’s fantastic for [Torrealba and his team’s] track record and their confidence.”
In the wake of Metro Parc, MG Developer is pressing the throttle, launching a pipeline of six major projects, equal to the number completed in the company’s first decade.
Torrealba is planning 225 condo units and 1,157 apartments in separate developments across five cities, including a 340-foot waterfront mixed-use tower planned for North Bay Village — where heavyweights like Bruce Eichner, Shoma Group and the Ansin family’s Sunbeam Properties are planning luxury condominiums.
“When you are doing predevelopment, you start seeing the magnitude of the pipeline,” he said.
From car dealer to developer
In 1990, when he was 20, Torrealba launched a used car dealership in his home city of Caracas that he steadily expanded into 14 showrooms, signing deals with major car brands like Kia and Fiat. By the late 2000s, Torrealba left Venezuela due to the political instability brought on by the socialist dictatorships of Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro. He resettled in Puerto Rico where he established the island’s first Kia dealership.
In 2013, he shuttled between Puerto Rico and Coral Gables where he joined a small circle of friends buying and selling single-family homes in the city. Two years later, he was offered a development site in Coral Gables, and he became a fulltime builder. “I decided to leave car sales and dedicate myself 100 percent to real estate development,” Torrealba told The Real Deal. “I recruited people who could help me move forward and build the company.”
But breaking into Miami’s real estate game was tough.
“Banks didn’t really have any appetite to finance a group with no track record,” Torrealba admitted. “Through banking relationships that local lawyers and consultants working with us had, we were able to obtain credit. We experienced some bumps.”
Torrealba’s firm started small with 444 Valencia Avenue, a seven-townhome project, and Biltmore Parc, a 32-unit condominium, that were both completed in 2017. The same year, MG Developer sold all the Valencia Avenue units for between $1.5 million and $2.2 million, records show. At the seven-story Biltmore Parc, prices ranged from $1.2 million to $2 million.
To attract buyers, MG Developer tried some novel approaches. Torrealba would offer free one-year memberships to the private club at Coral Gables’ historic Biltmore Hotel, or allow buyers to move in with only 10 percent deposits and a year’s time to close on purchases.
Between 2018 and 2021, MG Developer completed two more townhome projects. This year, the firm finished The Village of Coral Gables, a 2.6-acre community with 48 duplexes, townhomes, lofts and condos.
During MG Developer’s initial wave in Coral Gables, before the pandemic led to skyrocketing prices for South Florida residential properties, single-family homes were going for $500,000 in the city, Torrealba says. “We started price points that didn’t exist,” Torrealba said. “We used our own completed projects as comparables for the new ones.”
Racing into other submarkets
Torrealba’s move into multifamily came with Metro Parc in Hialeah. MG Developer’s partner Baron Property Group was seeking a foothold in Miami-Dade County but lacked the local connections to identify viable development sites and untapped submarkets, and to navigate local governmental bureaucracies.
“MG Developer didn’t have a track record developing large-scale buildings,” Baron told TRD. “But we toured a bunch of their projects—they were building very high-quality buildings, just not at scale.”
The match worked: Baron brought large-development and financial heft, Torrealba supplied local knowledge and attention to high-quality construction. Metro Parc exceeded early expectations.
Recently, the joint venture parted ways on co-developing two more multifamily projects. In December, Baron Property Group bought MG Developer’s 50 percent interest in Merrick Parc, a planned two-tower complex with 806 apartments in Coral Gables, and Metro Parc North, a planned 10-story building with 620 units in Hialeah, adjacent to the joint venture’s recently completed project.
The split was due to MG Developer making a “strategic shift” in its pipeline, Torrealba explained.
But Torrealba and Baron remain on good terms.
“I think they’ll face many of the same challenges anybody else would face,” Baron said. “But having gotten to know Alirio’s mindset, they are going to execute at a high level.”
MG Developer started with a staff of eight people and now has two dozen employees, including Torrealba’s adult sons who joined the firm, setting up a line of succession. And MG Developer is having an easier time landing financing for its upcoming projects. For instance, Scale Lending recently provided a $105 million construction loan for MG Developer’s Metro Parc South, a planned 10-story building with 347 apartments that is also near the first Metro Parc project.
Torrealba acknowledges that South Florida’s development landscape is unpredictable, and market shifts will determine success or setbacks.
“The market is constantly changing and evolving,” Torrealba said. “It can be going great and then all of sudden things will stop. But there is still a lot of appetite for investing in Miami. That keeps us motivated.”
