- May 11, 2025
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The Ronto Group was founded by Anthony Solomon’s father, A. Jack Solomon, in 1967.
The senior Solomon was a homebuilder and the firm was based in Toronto in those early days. It discovered Florida pretty early on its lifespan, though, opening an office on the state’s east coast and developing projects there between 1977 and 1986.
That’s before, like a lot of Canadians, it moved south for good — settling in Naples, where its headquarters are today.
Anthony Solomon, 50, grew up in the business, working with his father before beginning the process to take over the company in 2010.
Today he is the president and owner of Ronto and in that role has overseen about $4.5 billion in deals and projects.
In just the past eight years, the company says, Ronto has worked to develop three high rise towers and two mid-rise communities totaling more than 750 residential units in Southwest Florida.
Several other projects are in the works. Those include: the 43-unit Rosewood Residences in Naples; the 64-unit Rosewood Residences Lido Key in Sarasota; the 54-unit Amara on Sarasota Bay; and the nearby 29-unit The Owen Golden Gate Park.
Despite all those projects, Solomon says among the company’s most successful deals are the ones it walked away from.
“My grandfather had a saying that there's always another streetcar,” he says.
“You can take your time. It's never the last opportunity you'll see, so you don't need to jump at everything.”
Solomon trained with his father and says the lessons he learned from Jack are invaluable.
Chief among those is one that echoes his grandfather’s advice: Never make a deal just to make a deal.
Solomon says the firm is disciplined about remaining focused on what it does best and what it likes and doesn’t like. A big part of that is analyzing the details quickly and making decisions on what to move forward on, knowing what's going to pencil out and what’s not.
It is not always easy to walk away, he says, but it is worth it.
“Right afterwards," he says, "there's a sense of relief when you finally put the pencil down and say, ‘this one's not working, I'm forcing it too hard, I'm trying too hard,’ when you know in your heart that you're stretching or trying to jam a round peg into a square hole.”
Solomon says he "fortunately" hasn not "had any catastrophic mistakes.”
But if he were to pick one, it would be that he has underestimated how long the process to develop a property takes.
Designs, entitlements, approvals can get waylaid from several angles, meaning projects get thrown off schedule, upending careful planning.
“Generally, for most developers, everything takes longer than it should,” Solomon says. “Sometimes things are just out of your control, right?”
The development of Naples Square in 2014 was a big tipping point, despite the history dating back 58 years.
The project — with 300 units and 150,000 square feet of commercial space — is at the gateway of the city’s tony Fifth Avenue district.
He says the 19-acre development is a “real landmark” because the property had sat empty for years and become an eyesore. But he saw an opportunity as the country was coming out of a recession and the conventional thinking was no one was going to buy condos anymore.
“Having great success on a very prominent piece (of property). Making something out of a location where everybody had always wondered, ‘Why is there nothing there?’ And being able to be the first one in Southwest Florida putting condos on the market” Solomon says.
“That, I would say, was a tipping point.”
“I think, No. 1, is you need to surround yourself with good people and people you trust and let those people, to a large extent, be responsible.”
While Solomon is involved in every facet of the company, employees are empowered to walk into a meeting and make decisions. A key to that is communication, making sure they understand the goals of the firm and having conversations at each stage of a project.
“Continuity in the team is very important,” he says, “so they know what the culture of the organization is, what your vision is, how you like things done. That's incredibly important.”
Like most developers, Solomon’s business, despite the best planning, often depends on a force out of his control: government.
The real estate market is already finicky and unpredictable, but changes to building codes as a project is being designed, or a change to land development regulations, or simply getting caught in the middle of regulatory and political crossfire, can create major delays.
“You are planning on something and then there's some sort of shift or change and all of a sudden you find that your entitlements are at risk. Or there's more hoops to jump through that are going to take longer,” he says. “That is a constant threat.”
The best part of his running the company involves, in a way, dealing with those threats.
“Your job is to solve puzzles,” Solomon says. “That’s how I look at what we do. Putting the puzzle together.”
The kinds of deals Ronto does involves dozens of separate pieces and decisions to work together so the whole project will work — for the full picture to evolve. That includes coming up with designs, determining sizes, adjusting pricing and, sometimes, changing directions when government regulations change midway through a project.
That’s even more of challenge given that there’s no real formula for development, Solomon says. Every piece of land is unique, every market is different, every entitlement is little different.
“You just don't know what's going to come at you that day, which is both exciting and horrible.”
