Real estate investor Ben Mallah says he’s applying the brakes.
“I’ve done enough real estate for 40 years now,” the self-made mogul told the Catalyst. “It just seems that scaling back is the right thing for me to do.”
Mallah is selling the portion of John’s Pass Village & Boardwalk, 54,000 square feet of prime waterfront retail, that he purchased in 2019. The asking price is $43 million.
He paid $17.2 million for the property, at the southern end of Madeira Beach, at auction in 2019. The purchase included a six-story public parking garage, Hubbard’s Marina, the Friendly Fisherman, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and Hooter’s, as well as about 20 retail shops on the boardwalk.
Mallah, whose YouTube business-advice channel boasts more than one million subscribers, has a real estate portfolio of $500 million (according to benmallah.com).
The native New Yorker began his real estate career buying, rehabbing and selling multi-family residential buildings.
Still, he said, “When you have a big portfolio, you have to constantly run it and manage it. So it’s a good time to maybe hit the reset button.”
His company, Equity Management Partners, is now overseen by his son, Ben Mallah Jr. “It’s time to pass the torch,” said Mallah.
Over the past year, he has divested himself of Largo’s Shops at Midway (for $10M), the Clearwater Beach Hotel ($9M) and several other properties.
Currently on the market is Mallah’s three-story waterfront estate in Belleair Beach, with an asking price of $35M.
“My youngest son just started college, and we have no need for such a huge house,” he explained. “I just turned 60, so me and the wife are just going to scale down and start simplifying our life. Set the kids up to where they have a good real estate portfolio to run and grow.”
He said he is “re-organizing my portfolio and setting my kids up. To get back into multi-family – we see opportunity coming there, and that’s where we’d like to be. Probably shifting away from retail and hospitality, and journey back into the multi-family business.”
Mallah will continue to operate his private consultation business (“that’s where I get most of my satisfaction; I really like just consulting and helping other people”) and his YouTube channel.
“That’s basically it. You gotta keep making changes in your life, and now’s the time where I just feel like making some changes. Moving on – and maybe get to retire one day. Or just semi-retire.”
John’s Pass Village & Boardwalk. Photo: RIPCO Investment Sales.
He’s proud of the changes he helped bring about to John’s Pass Village, which was constructed in the late 1970s.
“We took a tremendous amount of dead, vacant retail space on the second floor,” Mallah recalled. “That nobody really wanted to be on. We built out 20 hotel rooms there, then we bought the building next door, which was all condos and other businesses. We re-vamped the whole parking garage with new equipment and automated systems.
“We did a whole lot of behind-the-scenes stuff with mechanical systems that needed to be replaced. The elevators needed to be re-done, because of the beating they took from the salt water.”
The prospect of retirement (or semi-retirement, or hitting the reset button) doesn’t mean Ben Mallah’s mind isn’t still laser-focused on the future.
“Even though we’re selling, we have plans that are underway to build six more hotel rooms in some vacant second-floor space in that little building. There’s an empty lot there, and whoever buys it can build probably another 20 rooms.”
Now that the long-delayed dredging of excess sand from the pass has begun, “The owner of John’s Pass, if it’s still us, we definitely could go in and put more docks there.”
RIPCO Investment Sales is the agent for John’s Pass Boardwalk & Village. View the sales brochure here.