“We competed with all of the Hall of Fame players, and the differences between them and us can be marked in a few categories,” he says. For one thing, “We're a boutique firm, so we don't light up the room with five managing directors and stories of seven offices; we light up the room with solutions.”

Additionally, says Ashraf, “We understood this to be a two-million-square-foot ecosystem in various stages of development in Boca Raton, a city that needs a little bit of a story to be told. We had a lot of creative ideas around structuring and great flexibility in the financing structure that the sponsor needed to realize their vision. You can only bring that vision and meet that vision if you're a career lender. The fact that I've closed $5 billion in construction loans as a lender allows me to be a pretty good advisor, and very smart, sophisticated sponsors get that.”

He adds that it makes for “a very powerful pitch in front of sponsors when you can say that you've done $5 billion of this yourself. They appreciate that you understand the nuances and the technicalities and are able to articulate this to a lender.”

The difference between Lotus' ”interview,” as it were, and that of the traditional brokerage advisory firm for the Via Mizner deal was that “ours was turning more into a real advisory conversation, as opposed to a brokerage one. Through that, we were able to secure the assignment, and five or five months later we arranged the year's largest financing in the state of Florida.” It's one element of a track record that Ashraf says will see the company end 2017, its first full year of operation, with $1 billion in closed transactions, quickly ranking it among “the top 1% in the country.”