- January 15, 2026
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Georgette “Gi Gi” Gillis sold her first hotel just outside Clearwater Beach about 40 years ago.
This was back in the early 1980s when Clearwater Beach was just another quaint beachside community along the Gulf, before the mom-and-pop motels of Florida lore were taken over by the Hyatt-Regencys and IHG Hotels & Resorts of Florida’s modern reality.
The hotel was on Belleair Beach, a small beachfront strip just south of Clearwater Beach, and sat where the Nautical Watch Beach Resort sits today.
Little could Gillis have known at the time, that the sale would, over the ensuing decades, turn into her life’s work. Over that time, she has created a network of owners, investors and developers who she helped stitch together complicated beachfront assemblages, turning the small motels into development sites attractive to institutional buyers.
“I’ve been very, very active,” Gillis says of Clearwater Beach and the surrounding Pinellas County. “I’ve sold almost every hotel.”
Known in some circles as the Queen of Clearwater Beach (a nickname she’s not crazy about), Gillis owns Viewpoint Realty International, a boutique commercial brokerage in Largo.
While its best known for its hotel sales, it is also active in multifamily, residential, mobile home parks and retail assets. The firm also has a robust international business that grew from her work matching international investors with local hotel properties.
The firm does not disclose revenue figures, but a list on its website shows at least 90 hotels sold in 40 years — along with the caveat that "not all have been listed."
"To be conservative," says Anthony “Tony” Maccaroni, a senior agent who joined the firm eight years ago, "I would say she has been involved with over 300 hotel/motel and development site transactions in Pinellas County.
"Remember, she sold some of these two, even three times."
Maccaroni, who met Gillis when representing the seller in the sale of a 42-room hotel, says that while the firm’s foundation is solid thanks to Gillis’ decades building relationships and repeat clients, it’s gone about its work quietly.
Gillis, her cell phone constantly ringing and a baroque ring on each finger, is a rarity in a what can be an ego and personality driven industry.
“She’s been selling hotels for a long, time,” Maccaroni, 57, says. “But we always get upset at Gigi because she hasn’t bragged. You make a $20, $30 million-dollar deal, tell somebody about it.”
The firm is now working to go to a “different level,” says Gillis.
That includes bringing on an agent who speaks five languages and is building international affiliations — including connections in Greece and the south of France — and modernizing operations, creating stronger marketing, better communication and a more visible branding.
And it’s also shining a spotlight on Gillis.
Gillis says she began her real estate career more than 40 years ago after getting licensed while raising a family in Clearwater.
Before real estate, she worked as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines and Pan Am.
After she married, she had two children and was looking for work she could fit into family life
Her husband, Rick Gillis, who died about two years ago, was a college football coach and teacher who got a real estate license. Gi Gi Gillis says he became Viewpoints’ broker, in part so she could keep traveling for business.
Gi Gi Gillis initially sold condominiums, but her focus shifted after a buyer asked her to find a hotel — a request that led to the Belleair Beach deal.
After that, she started out with a brokerage that would let her pursue hotel deals only if she split the business in a way she found limiting. “They said to me, ‘We’ll let you sell these hotels, but you’ve got to split everything with us,’” she says.
“Well, I didn’t want to do that.”
She moved to a 100% commission office and developed the habit that would become central to her practice: keep calling, keep talking, keep collecting information.
“I’m a talker, as you can figure out real quick,” she says.
Over time, Clearwater Beach became her primary market, particularly during a period when the strip was dominated by small, independently owned motels.
As she learned the hotel business, Gillis says another opportunity emerged, one that combined her love of travel with an increased international demand for a way of immigrating to the U.S.
“Back when I did a lot of immigration work, I used to travel out of the country once a month” for meetings and to host seminars, she says. “I would go with an immigration attorney or go by myself, and I sold hotels — smaller hotels — that people could get a visa.”
The buyers as were from Canada, Poland, Germany, France and England. These were people looking for an investment that could qualify for different types of visas that were available. These were the types of visas that mandate the holders owns a business and is active in it.
A hotel was the perfect vehicle, says Gillis, because it not only helped the investor get a visa but gave them a place to live. Buyers would settle in, build lives and often resell the properties when it was time to move on or move back.
“Over the years, they would stay seven years or whatever, and come back and say, ‘We might want to go back,’” Gillis says. “So, I would resell it.”
Maccaroni says the immigration work created a steady stream of clients — buyers and sellers — helping Gillis establish long-term relationships.
Those buyers, she says, often returned, creating repeat transactions and introducing new development opportunities.
Gillis says that as Clearwater Beach values rose, developers began looking for larger sites created by assembling multiple adjacent properties, asking if she could put two or three properties together.
This process of combining smaller properties into a single development often lead to the replacement of older motels with larger, higher-end projects. And transformed Clearwater Beach.
“We went from a blue-collar beach to something closer to Naples or Sarasota,” she says. “There’s very little left that hasn’t already been bought up or earmarked for redevelopment.”
While Gillis won’t share her age, there is no sign she intends to slow down.
Many of Viewpoint’s current listings are not publicly marketed, given owners look to avoid on-property distractions while hunting for qualified buyers.
“We know who the buyers are,” Maccaroni says. “That’s why people come to us.”
Among her recent deals are the Tahitian Resort on Treasure Island which sold for $1.5 million and the $25 million listing for the Monaco Hotel on Clearwater Beach. (Gillis brokered the sale of the Monaco, then the Island Cay, for $5.3 million eight years ago. It is the transaction where she first met Maccaroni.)
Today, the firm has about 20 agents. While some handle residential transactions, the firm is primarily focused on commercial real estate.
Maccaroni works on mobile home parks, retail strip centers and leasing assignments, while Gillis remains closely tied to resort and development transactions. (She’s also sold retail properties, including Pelican Walk Plaza on Clearwater Beach.)
Even with other sectors, the majority of the firm's work remains directly or indirectly tied to hotel properties. “If you include development tied to hotels,” Gillis says, “it’s probably close to 70%.”
As the firm works to reach for that “different level,” it is expanding and formalizing marketing and training systems. Gillis says agents with international experience and stronger digital skills are part of that effort.
Viewpoint also expects to open a second office, this one on Madeira Beach as part of a planned 90-unit development for a California-based client. The brokerage is expected to have an office within the project and handle sales of the units.
Gillis says her goal is to grow the brokerage beyond her own name recognition while continuing to focus on high-value coastal transactions.
“I don’t want it to be about me,” she says, despite Maccaroni encouraging to be more open. “I want it to be about the company and the people here.”
And the deals.
“As long as I’m able, I’m going to keep working.”
