It all started with lunch.
Developer Ian Bruce Eichner took his daughter, Alexandra, to the Little Beet in New York for veggie-forward bowls.
Before accepting the invitation and picking the spot, she said, “Dad, no disrespect, but what’s the agenda? There’s no casual lunch with you,” her father, who goes by Bruce, recounted.
About halfway through the meal, he made the ask. Would she consider working with him for a six-month trial period? It was 2019. She was running a fitness consulting business, which she started after a position overseeing content and brand development for the health firm BeachBody.
She agreed to it, starting as assistant project manager at the family’s Continuum Company in early 2020. Her mother, Leslie Eichner, is chief creative officer.
“I wasn’t thinking about succession because how would I know if she would like it, how would she fare, what would she be good at?” Bruce said.
As it turned out, Alexandra liked it and fared well. She moved to South Florida from New York and became the on-the-ground deputy for all of the company’s condo projects, which include the two-phase La Baia on the Bay Harbor Islands, a Continuum-branded development in North Bay Village and a luxury condo project planned in North Miami.
Now president of Continuum Florida, she is about to complete the first development she’s been involved in since its inception — La Baia South Residences, expected to be delivered this fall.
“[Bruce] has never had a me.”
Whereas some major real estate players seem to believe they’re immortal, ignoring succession planning, Eichner, 79, is taking seriously the idea of training his daughter, 37, to run his 1,000-unit, $3 billion condo portfolio. But he’s still Bruce — obsessive, passionate. There’s no set date, and he plans to keep working in the long term.
Like some developers of his generation, Bruce is self-made. He got into real estate without any capital or industry ties, while working as a prosecutor for the Brooklyn state attorney in 1973. He and his first wife, Helen, bought a rooming house, which he borrowed against to renovate the building. She got the property in the divorce, but he kept building.
Despite roots in the Big Apple, it’s not a coincidence that Alexandra is training up in the firm’s most active market, South Florida.
“I think it is very difficult for a 30-year-old entrepreneurial spirit to do in New York between 2022 and 2050 what I, Bruce Eichner, was able to do from 1975 to 2000,” he said in an interview with The Real Deal’s publisher, Amir Korangy, in 2024. “Easier to do it in a place like Florida, in a place that’s growing and where it’s more of a business-friendly environment.”
(The firm is still active in New York.)
Like father, like daughter
Alexandra shares a number of character traits with her dad. They’re both to-the-point and want to be five steps ahead of you. Both have sharp senses of humor. Both are detail-oriented. Alexandra, meticulous, wants to understand the inner workings of projects, she said. She focuses on placement of every amenity or fixture, and on the user experience of each building function: how long elevators take to go up and down and where residents will plug in the hair dryer.
“If you’re going to pay $1,500 a square foot, I don’t want you to have weird edges of corners that you can’t use,” she said.
Bruce is “always madly chasing the next piece of dirt,” Alexandra said, while she’s consumed with zoning. It’s her superpower, she said. She jokes that she’s reduced her land-use attorneys’ billable hours, but the skill gives her an edge compared to her competitors.
After five years, she can also now look at a site and visualize the building that will go there, which she couldn’t do when she started.
“Knowing as much as the lawyers do and understanding what the lawyers don’t know — that is the essence of a real estate developer,” Bruce said.
Attorney Rachel Streitfeld, mayor of North Bay Village, describes Alexandra as “energetic, relentless and savvy.”
Alexandra works out every day, including “heavy weight lifting,” she said — her personal record is deadlifting 205 pounds. The more stress she’s managing, the more you’ll spot her at the gym. “No pilates,” she emphasized. She can do seven pull-ups from a strict, straight-arm hang and has climbed to the South Pole.
She has also cultivated her risk muscle.
When the Waldorf Astoria Beach Club in Boca Raton, now called the Boca Raton Resort, was closing, Alexandra had the chance to buy the furniture, worth $20,000 per room, for $1,200 a room. She figured it could decorate the former Best Western hotel at a site Continuum had just purchased in North Bay Village, now called the Palm Tree Club.
The only problem? Continuum wouldn’t be closing on the property for several months, but the furniture purchase had to happen now — or never.
“When I saw the quality and color palette of the furniture I knew we wouldn’t have another opportunity like this, so I took a chance,” she said. “And then I spent the next three months joking with my husband that we might have 120 keys worth of furniture sitting in storage if we didn’t close on the property.”
The Eichners in North Bay Village
North Bay Village is a small three-island city that sits inside Biscayne Bay, between the mainland and Miami Beach. A 2020 zoning code overhaul allowed for bigger projects, and developers came.
The Eichners bought the first 1.4-acre part of its site, at 1755 79th Street Causeway, in 2023 for $35 million. They picked up the second part, the former Shuckers Waterfront Bar & Grill with an adjacent Best Western, for $75 million last year. (Jesta Group had planned to redevelop the latter property but sold it to Continuum.)
The pipeline is robust in the village, but Continuum is the first big project to move forward with building permits, Streitfeld said.
“We have spent a lot of time, energy and money overhauling our zoning code,” she said. “We worked our butts off. The approvals mean nothing for the municipality until someone pulls a permit.”
Continuum’s work will give others proof of concept, she added: “A lot is riding on them.”
The first phase, called Continuum Club & Residences, is under construction and at least 50 percent presold.ma
Other projects include one from Sunbeam Properties, led by Andy Ansin of the billionaire Ansin family, which assembled about 13 acres, and in 2022 secured approvals for a massive, phased development. Mikael Hamaoui’s Riviera Horizons also plans a Pagani-branded, 30-story, 70-unit condo project in North Bay Village. Shoma Group, led by Masoud Shojaee and his wife, Stephanie, is working on Shoma Bay, a condo tower, but has been delayed; construction could start later this year, based on a recently amended development agreement. Related Group and Macklowe Properties also plan to develop hundreds of condos on Harbor Island in North Bay Village.
In 2023, Alexandra helped write the village’s workforce housing law, which passed in 2023. The law, among other things, requires that developers set aside a percentage of units in new rental projects as workforce housing, incentivizing them with additional height or density.
“She’s just so ready to dig into the weeds and the details and look at the code, question the code, work with our planners and make sure she understands the regulatory framework,” Streitfeld said. “Even in the cases where we weren’t so thrilled about something, she presented her position so effectively that we were won over.”
In June, the North Bay Village Commission unanimously approved a special area plan, site plan and development agreement for the entire Continuum Waterfront District, which encompasses both sites and is planned to have two condo towers, a 200-key Continuum hotel and a marina. One tower can now be up to 440 feet tall.
The idea to bring in Palm Tree, the hospitality company run by DJ Kygo and his manager Myles Shear, to the current hotel and restaurant in the interim before development started, was Alexandra’s idea.
The restaurant and bar now feels like an influencer’s dream (and some residents’ nightmares due to the loud music). It has brought a hipper crowd to North Bay Village.
Future lunch invitations?
In 2022, Alexandra secured a “gnarly approval” at the Bay Harbor development after a new building official determined that the already entitled La Baia South project had an issue with FEMA compliance.
“I found this funky mechanism that allowed us to reduce our parking count to be compliant with other things, which required approval. That was the first time I realized I was very into reading code,” she said. It was a make-or-break moment for the project, and when she solved it, she got a promotion to president of Continuum Florida.
Now, La Baia South, a waterfront building designed by architect Luis Revuelta, is expected to be delivered within three months. It’s still unknown whether this project will replicate or exceed the Eichners’ success at the two-tower Continuum South Beach, completed in the early 2000s, where condos have appreciated in value over the years, holding some of the stronger per-square-foot pricing in Miami Beach.
“You either hand her the baton for the project or you don’t. That’s the challenge for the dad, when I have to step back or not.”
Alexandra plans to live at the new building, which has 68 units and eight stories, with her husband, Ozzie Pagan, who leads global finance for the commodities bank Macquarie, and their two mini Goldendoodles, Brooklyn and Blueberry.
Alexandra, Bruce said, still has more to learn, including the execution of an acquisition and fully understanding the intricacies of construction.
“What is intellectually challenging, you either hand her the baton for the project or you don’t,” Bruce said. “That’s the challenge for the dad, when I have to step back or not.”
Still, you get the sense from them that they are partners. Bruce is not a swashbuckling, cowboy developer who demands his adult children do what he says — or else. And Alexandra’s happy to be challenged.
“I want my brain to be working very hard,” she said. “If I’m not up at two in the morning thinking about a problem, I’m probably bored.”
Even if succession wasn’t front of mind for Bruce or Alexandra at that lunch in New York, a plan is clearly in motion. Bruce told TRD that Alexandra’s sister, Lindsay, a former real estate agent, could also eventually work for the family business.
In the meantime, the family firm is looking north to markets like Fort Lauderdale and Singer Island, Alexandra said, which are less saturated than the Miami Beaches and Brickells of the region. They’re busy, with two gung-ho developers at the helm.
“[Bruce] has never had a me,” Alexandra said. “And we are both pretty productive.”
