Those who can’t ball anymore, make it their logo.
Raanan Katz loves basketball and shopping centers. But the 89-year-old Israeli-born retail investor is no longer NBA material. Instead, up and down Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles Beach, his logo’s basketball swishes through a 2-D net on the facades of multiple RK Centers, which serve tens of thousands of residents of the condo skyscrapers that line the Atlantic Ocean here.
Katz is the Dwyane Wade of shopping center magnates, with a less famous résumé. RK operates more than seven dozen centers and big box stores spanning 100 million square feet across South Florida and New England. In a real estate market defined by flash and spectacle, Katz has quietly built an empire, one strip mall, one tenant, one three-point shot at a time, becoming the largest non-institutional shopping center owner in South Florida, retail experts say.
The magnate, who’s also a minority owner of the Miami Heat, is always looking to sink his next shot. His most playable skill: He always has the cash to make the deal.
Just in the first six months of this year, Sunny Isles Beach-based RK Centers picked up a Publix-anchored shopping center for $16.4 million from New York-based Nuveen Real Estate, and dropped $15.2 million for a showroom in Fort Lauderdale, buying the property from City Furniture, which also signed a lease to remain in the space.
“You don’t want him to be your competitor,” Todd Nepola, president of Hollywood-based commercial real estate firm Current Capital Group, said. “His cash flow is extraordinary. He can close deals no problem any day of the week.”
Katz initially agreed to an interview, but he did not respond to subsequent requests for comment. But brokers and partners like Nepola say he’s a silent legend in South Florida’s retail submarket, the shotmaker to know.
Sidelines to sidewalks
Born on a Kibbutz in northern Israel, Katz honed his basketball skills as a kid on a dirt half-court with a netless hoop. “I shoot and play like I’m 28 years old,” Katz told Miami New Times in 2006. “My specialty is the three-point shot.”
Katz’s prowess on the court earned him a spot on the Israeli national basketball team and, in 1962, a coveted invitation to the Boston Celtics’ training camp. Katz recalled being edged out by John Havlicek, at the time a future Hall of Fame point guard.
After a stint with the U.S. All-Stars, a team that played exhibitions against the Harlem Globetrotters, Katz settled in Boston in 1965. Basketball taught him discipline and hustle; he applied them to business. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Katz amassed residential rental properties in Boston, learning the ropes of property management and tenant relations. But it was in 1980, with the acquisition of three retail properties in Greater Boston, that Katz found his calling, according to RK Centers’ website.
By 1984, he had set his sights on Miami Beach, purchasing a block of stores and planting the RK flag in South Florida.
He soon moved up the coast.
“When he started buying in Sunny Isles Beach, no one wanted to go into that town,” Nepola said. “Now he looks like a genius. He has a tremendous edge because he’s been doing it for so long.”
Katz’s approach is conservative and hands-on, sources say. He operates with minimal debt, allowing him to weather market downturns and continuously invest in property improvements.
“Every one of his properties is maintained well, run well,” Nepola said. “He’s tough, but you gotta be.”
Despite his outsize impact on the retail landscape, Katz has long preferred to operate under the radar. “He’s not flashy,” Nepola observes. “You don’t see him flying around on jets and sailing on yachts. He is a tough negotiator and a hard operator.”
Katz’s work ethic is legendary, Nepola added. Even in his late eighties, Katz is known to visit his properties personally, scrutinizing everything from landscaping to signage.
His philosophy is simple: buy, hold and improve. Katz rarely sells, sticking to the asset class he knows best: shopping centers. “He’s smaller than institutions but bigger than the local guy who wants to buy a shopping center,” Nepola said. “He is buying 10-, 15-, 20-, 30-million-dollar deals. He has earned that edge.”
Robert Given of CBRE, who is marketing a former Sears property near Coral Gables that RK Centers owns, describes Katz as “a very shrewd businessman” with a laser-focus on cash flow. “He’s probably one of the most efficient investors we’ve ever worked with,” Given said. “He moves quick, and he gets his work done. He’ll tell you, ‘We’re closing this deal in 90 days,’ then he gets it done in 60.”
Early investor
Katz’s passion for basketball never waned.
In 1986, he bought a 12 percent stake in the Miami Heat, before the team had even played its first game. In the franchise’s early, tumultuous years, Katz found himself in the middle of ownership battles and once sued to block a sale he disagreed with. Ultimately, he remained a minority owner as the Heat were bought out by cruise ship moguls Micky and Ted Arison.
He also stayed committed to Israeli basketball as part owner of Maccabi Tel Aviv, which reached the Euroleague championship game four times, including back-to-back titles during his first two years of ownership.
“For some reason, I take Maccabi’s loss more to heart,” Katz told Miami New Times, reflecting on one tough defeat to CSKA Moscow.
He later sold his stake but continued to sponsor teams in Jerusalem, Galil and Holon, ensuring his legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sunny Isles Beach also named a street and recreation center after Katz, who is often there shooting baskets on Saturdays.
“He is not slowing down,” Nepola said. “He does love his basketball. He sits courtside at every Miami Heat game.”
Katz’s legal tangles and tenacity
Katz’s preference for staying out of the limelight hit a snag in the 2010s, when a dispute with a former tenant spiraled into a decade-long legal battle.
After RK Centers called police on ex-tenant Irina Chevaldina in 2009 for trespassing, she sued Katz, his son Daniel Katz and two RK Centers affiliates. When her two lawsuits were dismissed a year later, Chevaldina allegedly clapped back on the Internet.
She allegedly launched a blog and other websites that included the words “rk associates usa,” and proceeded to bash Katz and his business tactics on a regular basis in online postings, according to court filings. In 2011, Katz, his son and the two RK Centers affiliates sued Chevaldina for defamation. The legal war raged for about a decade even after the Katzes and Chevaldina reached a settlement agreement in 2014, court records show.
Katz also sued Chevaldina and Google in federal court for copyright infringement. He was trying to stop her from using a photo of himself that he bought from a national photographer who had originally taken the picture for Haaretz. According to court records, Katz objected to the use of the image because he believed it was unflattering. An appeals court overturned a lower court ruling that had barred Irina from using the photo in her blog posts.
A Miami-Dade judge dismissed the Katzes’ defamation lawsuit in 2017 after confirming that Chevaldina had taken down several blog posts depicting Raanan Katz in a “convict’s jumpsuit [that] were brought to the court’s attention by Mr. Katz’s counsel.”
In a 2021 federal lawsuit that was dismissed the same year, Chevaldina revealed she had paid the Katzes $165,000 in addition to shutting down her blogs as part of their settlement agreement. But she accused the Katzes of reneging on their end of the deal by continuing to deny her entry to RK Centers shopping centers in Sunny Isles Beach.
Other legal skirmishes—over pandemic-era rent relief, parking lot access and lease disputes — have similarly ended with Katz standing his ground, often prevailing or reaching pragmatic settlements.
Raanan Katz’s three children, David, Dan, and Sabra, are in the business.
“His kids are involved, and those guys are strong experts in their own right,” noted CRBE’s Given. “They are savvy participants in the real estate investment world.”
But succession planning is likely not at the forefront of Katz’s mind. “I don’t think he’s retiring,” Given said. “I don’t think that’s a word that Raanan knows.”
