Two men, two routes in real estate
A relative newcomer to the suburban commercial real estate market, developer Jeremy Leventhal already knows what to avoid when looking for new investment opportunities for his 3-year-old company.
In Fairfield County, Conn., that means steering clear of “Scinto Land,” the 28-year-old managing partner of Faros Properties told a White Plains luncheon audience recently at a real estate discussion presented by The Business Journals and Wag magazine.
“Scinto Land” is Shelton, where Robert D. “Bob” Scinto, chairman of R.D. Scinto Inc., has built a portfolio that includes about 3 million square feet of office and industrial space with a nearly 98 percent overall occupancy rate. Leventhal and Scinto shared the speakers”™ stage in front of about 150 real estate industry professionals at The Bristal at White Plains.
“Bob”™s the reason we don”™t invest north of Westport,” Leventhal said in a nod to his white-haired elder in the region”™s office market, drawing laughs from the audience.
Though a fairly recent arrival in the Westchester County market, Leventhal grew up in the Boston real estate business started by his grandfather, which went public in the 1990s. His father, Alan M. Leventhal, founded and is chairman and CEO of Beacon Capital Partners in Boston. Beacon Capital owns Westchester One, the county”™s oldest office tower, at 44 S. Broadway in White Plains.
Leventhal expanded on his family education in the business with a stint in corporate finance at Morgan Stanley, where he worked in the real estate investment banking division and on the firm”™s real estate private equity platform. In 2010, he and his brother and a third partner started Faros Properties in Manhattan.
The company in the last two years has purchased about $100 million of real estate comprising about 750,000 square feet of office and residential space. Their properties include 120 Bloomingdale Road in White Plains, where Faros Properties and partner Caspi Development this year received city approval to develop up to 50,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, and the three-building International Corporate Center at 555 Theodore Fremd Ave. in Rye.
Venturing into a new real estate sector and urban market, Faros Properties last November acquired a 300,000-square-foot, 400-unit apartment complex in Pittsburgh designed by architect I.M. Pei.
Scinto”™s personal story of success and fortunes made and lost and made again was in sharp contrast to the advantages of family legacy, privilege and higher education described by Leventhal.
“Basically when I graduated high school, I couldn”™t read,” Scinto said. He joined his father in his Shelton plumbing business, working for five years as a plumber at $92.50 a week.
But wearing a suit of black soot threaded by sweat at the end of his work day drove Scinto to imagine and pursue a better life of service to others. He began buying rooming houses, collecting rent and making repairs himself. He took noncredit courses at the University of Connecticut in Stamford and learned to write the feasibility studies needed to obtain bank loans for his real estate ventures.
The dyslexia that hindered him in school served him well as a developer, Scinto said, because dyslexics think visually. “It allowed me to see how a building should look and where it should sit,” he said.
Scinto stressed and Leventhal agreed that tenant retention is the key to success as a landlord. “Do things that other people don”™t do,” said Scinto, reciting a long list of amenities for tenants at his company”™s Enterprise Corporate Park that include free flu shots, club memberships and trips on the landlord”™s boat.
Like Leventhal, Scinto has learned what to avoid in his real estate business.
“I lost $10 million” on a residential tower he opened in his Shelton office park. “That was my first and last apartment building. Building apartments and building office buildings is a night and day business ”“ totally different.”
Real estate broker Howard Greenberg, co-moderator of the real estate duo”™s discussion, described a scene at a day care center in a Scinto office park that illustrates the landlord”™s focus on tenant retention.
“Bob Scinto is way ahead of the curve,” Greenberg said. “He”™s grooming his own tenants for the next generation.”
At the day care center, Scinto follows up his greeting to 3-year-olds with a question: “Hey, kids, who you going to lease space from when you grow up?”
Said Greenberg: “They all say, ”˜Bob!”™”