Real estate is a notoriously male-dominated industry, but in South Florida a growing number of women power players are making their mark on the tri-county region’s changing skylines.
A recent study by the MIT Center for Real Estate and CREW Network Foundation found that women make up just 38 percent of the commercial real estate workforce. Earlier this year, The Real Deal featured its Top 100 South Florida real estate leaders, including 22 of the women at the top of the industry.
Here’s a look at a few of the women real estate leaders highlighted this year:
Trailblazers
Donna Abood is a force in South Florida’s commercial real estate industry. Abood is one of Miami-Dade County’s top office lease brokers, with more than 80 million square feet of office space leased in her career. She founded her own firm in 1989, before merging with Michael Fay and the late Thomas Wood Sr. to form Abood Wood-Fay Real Estate. The company rebranded under Colliers before Avison Young acquired it in 2014. In 2024, Abood joined Savills as the co-head and vice chairman of Florida.
Tere Blanca is the chairman and CEO of Blanca Commercial Real Estate, the commercial real estate brokerage she launched in 2009 after a five-year stint at Cushman & Wakefield. Her clients include Nuveen Real Estate and Pimco Prime Real Estate’s 250-acre Waterford Business District, CP Group’s One Biscayne Tower and Terra’s the Well Bay Harbor Islands, where Tom Brady’s family office leased 8,400 square feet.
Mayi de la Vega similarly struck out on her own amid the global financial crisis. She got her start in real estate as an agent with Coldwell Banker Realty in the 1990s, and founded One Sotheby’s International Realty in 2008. The Coconut Grove-based brokerage is a dominant player in Miami’s luxury real estate market. It placed fourth in TRD’s 2025 Miami-Dade County brokerage ranking with $2.4 billion in on-market sales.
The “Queen of the Miami River” Lissette Calderon got her start in real estate working for Jorge Pérez at Related Group in the 1990s. She struck out on her own in 2000 to found Neology Life Development Group and build more than 1,000 apartment units along the Miami River. In 2014, she returned to Related, becoming the first woman to lead a division at the condo giant. She left again in 2017 to focus on her own multifamily developments, and remains one of the few women in the region building at scale.
Resi stars
According to the National Association of Realtors, 62 percent of agents are women. But the picture is different at the top of the field. Only seven of the 25 top agents and teams recognized in TRD’s 2025 Miami-Dade County broker ranking were women or women-led. In TRD’s 2026 Palm Beach County ranking, five of the 20 agents and teams ranked were women or women-led.
In Miami-Dade, Jill Hertzberg, Jill Eber and Judy Zeder, better known as “the Jills,” dominated with $1.4 billion in on-market sales last year. The trio heads their namesake team at Coldwell Banker Realty, and consistently ranks as the brokerage’s top team in the country.
Douglas Elliman’s No.1 agent Dina Goldentayer has carved a spot out for herself at the top of Miami’s ultraluxury market. In 2023, she represented Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in his $79 million purchase of a waterfront Indian Creek Island estate.Alicia Cervera Lamadrid and her sister, Veronica Cervera Goeseke, lead Cervera Real Estate in Miami. The new development sales powerhouse was founded by their mother, Alicia Cervera, in 1969 after the family fled to Florida from Cuba. The sisters lead the firm, overseeing sales for more than 25,000 condos across over 100 projects.
