This is a production of WEDU, PBS Tampa, St. Petersburg.

Sarasota.

[MUSIC] Are you living the American Dream?

Do you believe that anyone can achieve success in this country through hard work and determination?

Well guess what?

Only half of Americans still believe in it.

And when you ask young people or low wage workers, only about a third still believe a big problem is the disparity between incomes and the rapidly rising cost of living, particularly when it comes to affordable housing.

You're about to meet a Sarasota, Florida, entrepreneur who's carrying on his family's legacy that everyone who works deserves a clean, safe, affordable roof over their head.

Next on the Suncoast Business Forum.

Suncoast Business Forum, brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James.

Offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting client's financial well-being first.

More information is available at Raymond james.com.

[MUSIC] From 2019 to 2023, wages in the Tampa Bay market increased about 20%, which is not bad until you realize that rents rose more than 30% during that period and home prices rose even faster.

Economists say annual housing costs should be no more than a third of a family's income.

But according to U.S. census data, nearly one out of three Tampa Bay residents are spending more than half their income on housing.

In Sarasota, Mark Vengroff, CEO of One Stop Housing, is putting affordable housing within reach of thousands of people.

Mark, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

Well thank you.

Thank you for having me.

It's an honor.

It's good to have you.

Now, affordable housing is increasingly getting beyond the reach of most working people.

This is a problem not just in this area, but all across the country.

What is behind this problem?

That's accelerating?

75% of the working families across the nation earn between 60 and 80% of the average median income, so it's 75% between 60 and 80% of the average median income.

That means they're they're earning too much money to qualify for what's affordable housing or subsidized section eight housing vouchers and such.

And they don't earn enough to to afford market rate.

Your typical market rate apartments.

And with the scary part is the missing middle.

That's all our essential workers.

That's your nurses, your police officers, hospitality, the restaurant.

You go to, the restaurant, who's serving you?

It's in the stores.

This is your teachers.

It's your missing middle.

Those are the people that are basically working multiple jobs in order just to keep a roof over their head.

The name of your firm, One Stop housing.

It seems so straightforward, right?

But at the same time, it offers a lot of promise.

One Stop Housing is promising a lot.

How do you fulfill that promise?

So we have a a full development team that goes and does the entitlements, the drafting.

They do the assessment of a land and the acquisition.

We have a full management team that does the property management, a construction company that does all the build.

So we're a licensed general contractor, licensed roofers, licensed electrician, licensed plumbing.

It's all in-house.

We acquire, build and then manage.

And by keeping the cost down, we're able to pay it forward by keeping our rents low and therefore one stop housing.

Your father, Harry Vengroff, started acquiring real estate quite a few years ago.

He was a real entrepreneur.

This was just one of his side businesses, really.

But about 20 years ago, he got pretty serious about affordable workforce housing.

What was his intention and how did this develop?

My father always believed that if you work, you deserve a clean, safe, affordable roof over your head.

And we ran.

We were running a company.

He was semi-retired, and he started buying up real estate.

And he realized that people were on the street.

They were working, working homeless, which was a new concept.

I mean, I've never heard of it.

And so he just started bringing people in to rent to them as an apartment because he really wanted to help them be philanthropic.

And he realized he can actually make money while being philanthropic, and hence the birth of one stop housing.

You own 4000 units, and you have a waiting list of 100 people for every one of your properties?

How do you make this model work?

And how do you meet the demand?

Yeah, you just don't.

You can't meet the demand.

Um, to give you an example, um, this is a problem across the nation, but to take the segment of just two counties in the southwest, Florida, Sarasota and Manatee County, there's over 40,000.

It's approximately 40,000, uh, of a deficit for workforce housing, affordable and workforce housing combined.

So that's a lot of families that are just struggling to to find anything they can afford.

Unfortunately, with 4000 units, we're building 1100 and we're trying to do it as fast as we can.

We just can't fill them fast enough.

It's crazy.

One stop housing goes beyond providing affordable housing and affordable roof over people's heads.

You actually have programs that are education that are leadership, financial management.

These are services that you provide to people in your communities.

Tell me about that.

So we created One Stop Cares.

It prevents homelessness by creating these wraparound services.

So when any of our residents of any of our apartments or in the nearby community run into some trouble, we have one stop cares that comes in.

If they don't have friends and family to help them out during those circumstances, and coordinates a whole series of care for whatever it might be to help them stay in the apartment, stay, keep a job, um, stay healthy and succeed into life and so that they can they can forge forward.

You've actually helped some of your tenants become entrepreneurs.

Um, it's following in my father's footsteps.

We he's a people always came to him.

He always had this big open door.

I mean, everybody could.

Anyone can come to him.

They'd come in and he'd try to help him out all the time.

I didn't have the same level of patience.

I wish I did, but there are a lot of people who are coming.

And so I grabbed a number of our investors that are high net worth families that really believed in this mission driven, get a nice return, but really do something good for a change with your money.

So I asked them, let's form a board.

Let's form a shark tank with mittens.

And so we started to introduce these entrepreneurs, residents, tenants that had some crazy mad skills.

Come in, meet us in a bar, keep it very informal.

They'd come in, they would present their idea.

No idea was bad.

We didn't want to kill their spirit.

And one of us would kind of just fall in love with their concept or the entrepreneur themselves and really believe in them, take them under our wing, and one of us would have this crazy Rolodex and Rolodex isn't even a term anymore, but, you know, have a good contact list to help them in a particular industry that they're trying to do.

And as a result, we are able to launch quite a few businesses in a very unofficial way.

These people would never be able to put together that glossy PowerPoint and go to an angel investor.

This was just more friends and family type of money.

We'd all chip in and knowing that they had a really good leader.

Tell us about your formative years.

Tell us about where you grew up.

Tell us about your family.

Born in Los Angeles but really grew up in New York on Long Island.

Um, I have an older brother.

My brother and I were always fight.

Um, my father would always bring me to work with him.

Your dad's firm was called Vengroff Williams, and it was one of the biggest debt collection agencies in the world.

Yeah, right.

So you got to see him build this up.

He would go in appointments, he'd take me with him, he'd go on sales calls.

And the guy was phenomenal.

Phenomenal sales person.

I grew up, went to work with my father every day.

Even as a kid, just.

I knew as soon as I knew the alphabet.

Went in.

And he had collectors work off of these little cue cards.

They were never in alphabetical order, because they're so busy making phone calls using these cue cards.

And so my job, as soon as I knew the alphabet was go in there and put them all in alphabetical order.

And boy, did I feel, you know, I did like 3 or 4 boxes a day.

And I felt really good about it, and I think I got some money for it as a result.

Were you a good student?

Were you involved in sports?

Did you work?

Obviously you did some work for your dad, but did you work while you were growing up?

I did a little bit of sports.

I was not the best student.

I did okay for a while, but parents were going through a divorce.

And then the typical childhood.

The thing that kind of affects you.

I didn't do too well.

I think they actually put me almost in an idiot class, and took me a year to prove that I really wasn't, you know, I was better than that, you know?

So eventually went to high school.

I was actually voted the most likely to not succeed, Which is just crazy.

That was a big motivator for me to really step it up and go.

You know, I never thought about myself as someone who couldn't.

And so to hear that, I was like, you know, maybe I should.

And I had a really good teacher in high school who gave me an A, gave me my first day, and I didn't deserve the A, I know I didn't deserve the A.

She gave me an A, and I remember going to her and go, Mrs. Niffenegger and I go, Mrs. Niffenegger, why did you give me the A?

I didn't deserve an A, she said, because I know it's in you.

And I thought, wow, that was pretty cool.

So and I actually did much better in school after I got that.

A so after college, you joined Vengroff Williams, you joined the family business.

Tell us about working within that business.

Um, and even while I was going to college, I would go to work in the family business and there would be little departments that my father had that he he got into subrogation, which is third party liability.

He was a good salesperson.

He sold the first client.

It was a State Farm subrogation department.

So he brought in all this debt or paper from subrogation claims.

And he goes, I don't know what it is, but it's a lot of money.

Can you help Mark?

Can you figure it out?

And so so we figured it out.

He we hired one person to help me, and we created a subrogation department for VW.

I thought I was so good at this, I thought I knew better.

I think it got to my head a little bit.

And so my father and I were bumping heads, and he he we go to Utah and he says, you know, um, wow, this Utah is so beautiful.

Look at the mountains.

I go, yeah, look at the mountains.

He goes, wow, look at the, you know, the skiing here.

And the air is so crisp and clean.

Not like New York.

And I go, yeah, the crisp is so the air is so clean.

And he goes, you know, I wish I could move here.

And I go, yeah, I wish I could move here.

He goes, well, I can't, but you can.

He says, so that's that was my uh, your time.

Start an office out here, hire the people, get it going.

And so that was my entree into the business.

At a really young age.

I was still going to school, and I opened up my first office for the company out to expand away from the mothership.

So you spent a year in Utah, you built up another operation for the firm, successfully came back to New York.

What happened then?

I started working a little bit, and then we realized we wanted to do a Western expansion.

So I went to California.

Um, opened up that office.

Actually, my grandfather was out there, so he and I did it together, which was really cool.

Um, and, and then I eventually just started taking over.

So I took over the company as a collection agency back then.

Um, and as I was going through that, I realized we were collecting on some, some claims, and we just realized that those, A lot of the people that we were collecting from it was B2B companies to companies.

So a lot of the corporate debt were purchased that we were collecting from.

I'm realizing they should never have sold to these companies.

So we analyzed who they were selling to and trying to figure that out.

And then we went back and I went back to the client and said, you know, if if you didn't sell these are companies you shouldn't have sold to or you shouldn't have sold beyond this credit limit.

And here's why.

And there really wasn't credit scoring back then.

So we created a scoring model and we showed the client and it was a fortune 50 client.

And they went ahead and bought the program.

And they basically helped us to credit analyze the the credit on their accounts, um, to get the paper earlier.

So we would actually help them to analyze the credit, um, manage that.

Then we got into contract management and then we so we started expanding this business into a very early stage of outsourcing, with the idea that we should be working ourselves out of a job on the third party side.

It should never go there, because that meant something happened in the chain on the front end.

So we got really good at taking on these large portfolios for these companies and really streamlining and saving them millions of dollars.

And that just really helped us to to take off.

While you were doing the outsourcing, you developed the billion dollar forum.

What was the billion dollar forum?

I had Microsoft as a client, and I had Cisco Systems as a client.

And those heads of credit were there are really the top leader, the VP of finance for those global billion dollar businesses.

Neither of them knew each other.

They used to go to credit conferences, and everybody would want to pick their brain, and they just felt like they weren't getting anything out of it.

So they stopped attending anything.

And it was.

So I invited them both to lunch because I couldn't believe they didn't know each other.

One was in Seattle, the other one was in San Jose.

So had a lunch and they had so much out of that, out of that lunch together we go, you know, um, I need to we need to do this with other billion dollar companies and create a little form.

And so what we did was we we did the first one at Microsoft with the treasurer, I'm sorry, VP of finance for Microsoft.

We did it in Bill Gates's main conference room.

They had brought two other companies with them that they've invited.

So then we ended up with six.

And then those six turned into 12 and the 12 turned into 24.

And so, uh, other companies found out about it and they wanted to get in.

Um, and so in order for them to get in, they had to be interviewed by the moderator.

So I would fly out, meet with them, and then I would meet with the head of finance that had to have global responsibility and a portfolio of 1 billion or more.

And we would be talking and they would ask, so, you know, of course they want to know about the form, and then they want to know about who I am.

And I would tell them what I do and that we're we manage order to cash and we're full outsource technology services and, and consulting.

And they wanted to know more about it.

And of course I'm the one I'm the gatekeeper for them to get into this.

And so they credibility was through the roof immediately.

And I have to sell them on anything.

And then most of them I'd say, well, actually almost all of them became a client.

Um, not that they had to, but most of them became a client.

And we talked about best practices.

It was such an opportunity to get behind the scenes and understanding the thinking and the trends of these major corporations.

It was so phenomenal because then we built technology and programs and services.

I get to pitch them in a very non-sales environment to get their real feedback and help me craft what was needed.

And then we launch.

And when I launch, I already had it was like, you build the baseball field and they will come.

I already had them on.

They're already they're showing up before it was built.

There was no risk in investment and we just we had a massive client base to sell every service to the minute we had these things launched.

It was it was beautiful.

Our business just grew 23 offices, 19 countries, 1100 people.

And, um, we were managing somewhere around $23 billion back then.

So it started as a debt collection business, turned into a global outsourcing business to some of the largest corporations in the world.

Yeah, there comes a decision point where you have to decide, how big are we going to make this or do we sell?

Well, we're still a family business, so I had a lot of family on the board.

We were in the order to cash.

I need to get to the procure to pay side, which meant investment.

Um, and, and we also had to get into the South American market.

We're already starting to tap into Singapore.

We're already throughout Europe.

But in order to really do this right and stay competitive, we had to get to the other side of the equation.

And in a family business, I love my siblings, but you know that that's not that's not what they wanted.

So realized that we had to sell.

Um, and if we why we can.

And so basically, uh, worked it out, we were able to sell the business to one of our outsourcers who outsourced to us, which was Capgemini.

There was a little bit of a bidding war going on.

We sold the business, the outsource business to Capgemini, um, which allowed me an exit.

I ended up with a carve out and my non-compete to go start working capital optimization for hospitals, for the medical sector.

So after you sold the health care related business, you went into private equity, but you also went into advertising?

Yes, I was a consulting, or I'd say it was on the advisory boards of two different, uh, uh, private equity firms, one of which one of which were just all friends from Ypo Young Presidents organization.

We all grew up together being on that board.

They they bought an advertising company.

It was 100% Hispanic advertising agency.

The entrepreneur, she was a very, extremely, extremely talented entrepreneur that they bought the company.

She was talented in the advertising but was struggling, interacting with the private equity and finance and growing the business.

And, you know, growth was my specialty.

So they're on there and they want to they want her to be happy.

And so they basically asked if I would jump in as CEO and help in that transition.

So I ran that for about two years.

Loved the company.

Grew.

Did really well.

So while you were doing private equity, while you were doing the health care related business, were you doing advertising business?

You were out in Los Angeles.

Your dad in 2011 moved to Sarasota?

Yes.

And Vengroff Williams moved to Sarasota as well.

Yes.

And he got very involved with real estate again.

And that's really when one stop housing took off.

Yes.

Tell us about.

That.

My father was really retired at that point.

He was doing a little operations for for the collection agency that was left.

Most of that was still in the North, but my father was, uh, doing more real estate.

So he just started buying up more real estate, take business, take some of the cash that we've made, roll it into the real estate and kind of grow the portfolio.

And he was doing that with my brother to be active, philanthropic, truly mission driven, philanthropic.

Uh, And my younger brother is the one who came up with the name One Stop Housing.

So I got to give him full credit.

In 2017, you received a call from your dad, you were out in LA and you received a call that said he had a terminal illness.

Yeah.

And he asked you to come home?

Yeah.

He did.

He I was we were making commercials, doing media buys, living the dream, going to award shows for this Hispanic advertising agency.

I was starting to learn Spanish.

Really?

We felt like we were on fire, growing it nationally.

And then he calls up and he says, you know, I basically got about a year.

I need you to come back and take over the family business again.

You know, this real estate has gotten big and I can't sell it.

And I go, well, just just sell it.

You know, I said, really, I'm my wife and I are loving it out here, and I think you should just sell it.

And he says, I can't sell it because if I sold it, all those families were going to sell to someone else.

They'll come in, they'll jack up the rates, and all these families will be homeless.

They'll be out on the street.

I just can't see that happening.

And I go, yeah, it's a good point.

So someone else can run it.

He goes, no, no, I need you to come and run it.

Can you do me a favor?

Just come out for 2 or 3 days, spend 2 or 3 days with me, and and then, you know, whatever you decide, I honor.

So I did, jumped on a plane, brought my wife and I, we came out, I drove around with my father.

He threw me in the pickup truck, drove around in his pickup truck for two days.

We went on to various properties, met the people who lived there.

And that's when I realized that that, you know, the definition of workforce housing or affordable housing was, was really apparent to me.

It's it's everybody, you know, that's it's everyone.

It's just people that are living that somehow got the stigma media label on them.

And and then I met the managers, the management team.

Most of those people grew up on these properties and they were used to be tenant.

And now they're running And most of our management team has been there for 15, 20 years.

Just fell in love with the whole thing.

And I just said, wow, this is just remarkable what he's created.

My wife was very grateful to her.

She said, no, you got to do this.

So it, uh, it took me six months to get out of my advertising as a CEO.

I had to hire the replacement.

Get that person up and running.

And so, six months later, um, desks.

We took our desks side by side every single day.

I worked with him side by side.

And, you know, we never we always saw eye to eye, but I just just.

What a wonderful thing for a son to have or a father to have with his son every single day.

I really got to learn, um, how special he was, because I didn't see the things when people would come into the office and how he couldn't say no.

I didn't see that side.

I always thought, here's this tough guy that I just admire, but I didn't see the soft side so much, and the way he worked with people was just absolutely freaking amazing.

So I just, you know, I couldn't say no.

In 2018, your father passed away.

You took on the business One Stop Housing.

Yes.

You were 2000 units at that time.

You were 4000 units now.

And you're growing.

Yeah.

What is the legacy of your dad and of one stop housing?

Our management team, the people that are there, they're really.

We call it tribe.

We're an ash tribe.

And they are there.

They could work anywhere.

I mean, they really can.

They can make more money working somewhere else.

But they chose this because they really want to help the families that they're helping.

They really are.

They're drinking the Kool-Aid alongside with me on this, this journey.

And we're in it together.

And, you know, their kids are now starting to come to work and starting in the business.

Um, and they all have a home with us.

And I think what's going to end up happening?

The whole thing gets passed on and their kids, kids will be taken over, and the Vengroff family will always be some part of it.

But I think it really becomes more about them and their legacy.

Now, following taking the torch from my father to me, to them and carrying it forward.

And, you know, hopefully we'll replicate this model across the country.

Others will take note of, wow, you know, it can be done without a lot of government intervention.

The private sector can thrive when you allow them to.

And you know, if you take a little bit of greed out of the equation, wonderful things can happen.

And it's an extremely resilient business as a result that makes money.

Maybe not as much as either side, but it makes money and does good, and you can do both.

And it's a phenomenal model that I think that could be replicated across the country and hopefully solve a good put a big dent in our in our workforce housing problem.

Well, Mark, I want to thank you so much for being our guest today.

It's been great having you.

Yeah.

Well thank you.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

If you'd like to see this interview again or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.

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