Mark Vengroff finds his one last career stop the most rewarding

Mark Vengroff could still be living in Los Angeles, where he first was CEO of WestStar Group and later CEO Walker Advertising, the nation’s largest legal advertising firm that specializes in the Latino community. All that following a 29-year career in which he rose to CEO of the family business, Vengroff Willams & Associates, while living on Long Island, New York.

The son of a man who owned and sold a number of successful businesses, he could be long retired, living a life of leisure anywhere in the world. Since April 2018, though, he’s lived here, fulfilling the legacy of his late father, Harvey, whose mission was to provide affordable, preferably transitional, homes to as many as possible.

Instead of an executive suite in a posh office building off Interstate 110 in L.A., he sits at a desk in an open office space at One Stop Housing’s headquarters, located inside its own University Row apartments across U.S. 41 from Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. There, he and his staff operate more than 4,000 affordable rental units in Sarasota, Bradenton, Orlando and Memphis while planning to build hundreds more. 

“I'm fulfilling my father's mission 100%,” Vengroff, 59, said. “He believed that everyone who works deserves a clean, safe, affordable roof over their head. I didn't buy off on that mission at first, but then when he knew he was going to have a year to live, I was running the advertising agency. He was practically begging me to get over here, so I came, met with the managers, the tenants, and I just fell in love with the whole thing.”

Harvey Vengroff died in October 2018, leaving to his family its stake in one of the world’s largest debt collection agencies and a company that specialized in buying old motels and converting them into affordable apartments.

He also left one big piece of unfinished business.

Sarasota Station.

Beginning in 2015, Harvey Vengroff labored for three years to get his most ambitious project off the ground, a new construction development of nearly 400 residences on a vacant industrial site behind the Sarasota office of Vengroff Williams, one block north of Fruitville Road on the eastern edge of downtown.

Nine years later, after overcoming multiple obstacles posed by the city, a global pandemic and a dearth of capital, realization of Harvey Vengroff’s vision, albeit reimagined, is as close as it’s ever been. One Stop Housing has recently received full Development Review Committee sign-off for Sarasota Station, now planned as a 202-unit, 100% affordable housing project, being brought to fruition by his son.

Funding was the latest obstacle, one that Vengroff overcame by selling a portion of the property to a private developer who will build 77 luxury townhomes on its portion of the site. That sale netted One Stop Housing nearly $10 million. Also approved by Sarasota County is $15 million in Resilient SRQ federal funding.

“That's what closed up the capital stack and made it work,” Vengroff said last week, when he had expectations that Sarasota Station would break ground sometime in the fall.

Then on Tuesday, Vengroff received word of yet another possible delay, what he said are some minute-additional requirements that may require changes to the site plan.

“This unfortunately may either delay the build or could change the scope as originally modeled out and approved by the city,” Vengroff said.

A true one-stop shop

Selling a significant portion of Vengroff Williams in 2011, a retired Harvey Vengroff boarded his boat in New York and headed south. Rounding the bottom of the state, he turned north and headed toward Sarasota. Once he sailed into Sarasota Bay, Mark Vengroff said he knew he was home.

It didn’t take long before he recognized the need for affordable housing even back then. Harvey Vengroff, always the entrepreneur, founded One Stop Housing on one hand, and on the other helped create a loosely organized group of venture capitalists who provided seed money to startups. Mark Vengroff would often say his dad was always looking out for the “underdogs.”

Applying his business acumen to the affordable housing, Mark Vengroff has grown One Stop Housing with the addition of former general contractor Gabor Sztuska, the company’s president of housing development and construction. The company has also moved on from its model of acquiring and renovating old motels, Vengroff said, because they had become too expensive. The focus is now on new construction. In additional to Sarasota Station, the company is planning multiple workforce housing developments.

One Stop manages to keep rents low by employing efficient building practices. For example, regardless of the project, all units have the same floor plan from studio to two-bedroom models, with or without a den. 

“No matter what the exterior looks like, every apartment is identical,” Vengroff said. “Whether it's an exterior corridor or interior corridor, whether it's a hotel conversion or a brand new construction, all of them are the same. Our construction crews come in phases, and they know exactly what to do because they built hundreds of those same exact same units.”

One Stop Housing is also a licensed general contractor, licensed plumber, licensed electrician and licensed roofer. On staff is a full development team that can handle nearly every aspect short of civil engineering. 

“Our cost factor is just so far below what everyone else can do,” Vengroff said.

Then there is the purchasing department of four that acquires construction and finish materials in bulk. “That’s all they do,” Vengroff said. “They are just deal making, deal making and deal making.” That efficiency, he added, allows One Stop to use upgraded finishes in all of its units, further economized by the limited the floorplans across all properties.

“I can get 1,100 custom countertops all exactly the same, so it's super cheap,” Vengroff said. “I'm getting granite top countertops for almost nothing compared to what it would have been. I'm getting really high end, really nice materials for our residents.”

A rewarding final career

One Stop Housing’s emphasis is on proving residences for what Vengroff calls the “missing middle” of the affordable housing spectrum, those in the 60% to 100% of the area median income, which is artificially inflated in Sarasota County with its large, and generally wealthy, seasonal population.

Commercial developers answerable to investors, he said, can’t provide for that range.

“If I am a developer and I have a lot of capital, maybe I want to play in the game of market rate,” Vengroff said. “If I don’t have a lot of capital but I want really good margins and I don’t mind going through the government bureaucracy, maybe I am going to play in the field of affordable housing because there are tax credits and other incentives. 

"What ends up happening is there's nothing for this missing middle because everyone's either going to affordable or they're going to market rate.”

That leaves wage earners from 80% to 100% AMI — the bulk of service workers, teachers, public safety and others — struggling to find housing locally.

“That’s 75% of our workforce, with the other 25% scattered on either side of the spectrum,” Vengroff said. “We're doing it for the love of the mission.”

At its core, the mission is to provide a home that allows tenants to save money eventually move up the housing spectrum.

As a career he doesn’t really need, Vengroff said that mission is the most rewarding of all.

“I was supposed to be semi-retired, but the need is so great. I realized that let's just keep growing this thing, and that's why I do it. I ended up drinking the Kool-Aid and just said this is the right thing to do. We were very fortunate in life. We d extremely well and so what a great way to spend your time and what a wonderful group of people to work with.”