Profile · Miami · third person, cited
Raoul Thomas: a cited profile of the CGI Merchant Group founder and the transactions attributed to him
Raoul Thomas founded CGI Merchant Group in Miami in 2006 and led it through both the acquisitive phase and the unwind. This profile records what the published sources establish about that role, and is explicit about where the record stops.
Raoul Thomas and the founding of CGI Merchant Group in Miami
Raoul Thomas established CGI Merchant Group in Miami in 2006. For roughly its first decade the firm was an advisory business rather than a property owner; the surviving pages from that period describe capital markets work, project finance advisory, corporate finance advisory and a real estate investment group, all of it fee-earning rather than balance-sheet. That earlier practice is easy to overlook because it predates the coverage, and it is the half of the firm’s history the trade press never wrote about: the capital markets desk ran for roughly a decade before the first building was bought.
The shift to ownership came around 2020 and was rapid. Within roughly two years the firm announced a hospitality fund at $650 million, acquired hotels in Miami and Miami Beach, built a co-working platform across South Florida, committed to a campus hotel in Atlanta, and took a 95-year federal leasehold in Washington. He was the named principal in essentially all of that coverage.
Coverage of the period is indexed under both his name alone and under Raoul Thomas CGI, the shorthand the trade press used. The profile matters to this record for a practical reason as much as a biographical one: in a private firm with layered holding entities, the individual named in the announcements is often the only continuous public thread between transactions. Following him through the coverage is how the separate deals resolve into one portfolio.
The transactions attributed to the CGI Merchant Group founder
Two transactions dominate the public record. The first is the hospitality fund announced in December 2020, co-sponsored with A-Rod Corp and with Adi Chugh of Maverick Capital Partners named as joint venture partner. The structure is set out in full on its own entry; what matters here is that it was the vehicle through which nearly everything else was bought.
The second is the Old Post Office leasehold in Washington, acquired in 2022 from a Trump Organization entity for a reported $375 million and reopened as a Waldorf Astoria under a Hilton agreement. It required General Services Administration consent because the landlord is a federal agency, and it remains the transaction Raoul Thomas is most often identified with.
Alongside those sit a $250 million investment partnership announced in May 2022, and a $30 million commitment to a hotel development on the campus of Morris Brown College, a historically Black college in Atlanta. Both were announced by the firm and reported at the time; both are recorded here with that provenance stated, because an announced figure and a completed one are not the same thing.
Reporting filed under Raoul Thomas CGI covers the same ground from the trade side. He has also given interviews to the trade press about the fund and the strategy behind it. Those are recorded as what they are, a principal describing his own plans, and are not treated as independent confirmation of anything.
Where this profile of Raoul Thomas deliberately stops
Between 2024 and 2026 most of the portfolio left the firm. Reporting on that period is extensive and, in places, adverse. This record covers those events on the asset pages, where they belong, attributed to the publications that reported them. It does not extend them into claims about the person.
Specifically, this page does not assert why any transaction was structured as it was, does not characterise anyone’s judgement or conduct, does not describe any individual’s personal finances, and does not speculate about what happens next. A firm losing assets is a matter of public record. Inferences about the people who ran it are not, and the distinction is the whole reason this record can cover the subject at all.
Nothing on this page is written on his behalf, with his involvement, or with his approval. He appears here as the subject of published reporting. Where a source turns out to be wrong and is corrected, the correction is applied here; the record desk exists for that, and the charter explains the standard.
Sourcing note
Every statement above is drawn from published trade reporting, company announcements, or interviews given by the subject. Figures described as announced were announced; figures described as reported appeared in contemporaneous coverage. No private information is used here, and none was sought.