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A-Rod’s Properties and Charity Suggest Some Stinginess
The veneer of Alex Rodriguez’s real estate empire of working-class housing is staged to disguise his inner Mr. Potter.
Past a psychic’s storefront and coin laundry on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Tampa, Fla., a sign reading “We ♥ Our Residents” is planted beside manicured shrubs and an iron gate with a fresh coat at the entrance of Newport Riverside apartments.
The paint is camouflage for the mottled backside of the complex, where an exhausted appliance sits on a porch, cardboard is taped over broken window panes and missing spindles give rickety banisters the look of a snaggletooth smile.
Some residents here tell tales of roaches overtaking kitchen cabinets in a bumper-to-bumper crawl to the corn flakes, of carpets stained in the 1990s and quick-trigger evictions.
“My mom comes here and she ain’t no rich person, but she thinks I live in the projects,” said Miguel Ruiz as he sat on the second-floor landing of Building 2-A on a recent Sunday afternoon. “She’s scared to come over here, for real.”
As Ruiz spoke, he pulled a boy named Elijah from a gap in the railing that opened when yet another piece of the banister rattled loose and fell to the ground.
“See, stuff like that, with kids around, it’s messed up here,” Ruiz said, adding, “Honestly, I was raised in a ghetto and I was brought up a little better than this.”
This is one of six apartment complexes in the Tampa area, and one of at least 16 nationwide, that Rodriguez owns and operates as the chief executive of Newport Property Ventures.
An examination of his high-rolling corporate side, as well as a glossy A-Rod Family Foundation short on largess, reveals a portrait of Rodriguez as a player about to enter Yankee Take II solely for business purposes, primarily as a branding tool. He emerges as an obsessive pursuer of cold, hard numbers on and off the bases, with serially disingenuous nods to his ever-challenged image.
A-Rod isn’t exactly a slumlord — some renters interviewed at his other properties had milder complaints — but he has become a landlord caricature among dwellers who hold him accountable for, say, the stack of molding mattresses by the dumpster at Newport Villas on MacDill Avenue.
A-Rod is the face on their leaky faucets, and yet his name isn’t in the welcome kit. Rodriguez’s brother-in-law, Constantine Scurtis, is the company manager — the one whose signature is on nearly $50 million in mortgages for properties in Tampa, according to records — but some of the cashiers and cooks who live at places like Newport Riverside know who holds their house keys.
To them, he isn’t A-Rod, a regular-season crackerjack on the verge of a Yankees deal potentially worth $300 million. To them, he is Tight-Rod, an apartment tycoon, who, renters say, has jacked late fees to $100 from $50 on units that run around $600 a month.
“He’s got everything, so why take money off our backs?” ” said Roberto Santiago, standing next to his neighbor, Ruiz.
Why, with so many investment options, would A-Rod put himself in the unwinnable position of profiting off struggling families?
Messages left on the voice mails of Rodriguez and Scurtis at Newport Property Ventures’ offices in Coral Gables, Fla., were unreturned. Repeated efforts to reach A-Rod through three layers of publicists — think booby traps around a precious stone — were unsuccessful.
A-Rod doesn’t talk biz, the P.R. folks echoed.
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But Rodriguez’s CNBC devotions illuminate his baseball motivations. The next 10 years aren’t about team championships, but financial benchmarks linked to A-Rod’s rate of slugging, with a Monopoly game payout for eclipsing history: pass Barry Bonds, collect $6 million.
Money is A-Rod’s identity, engraving his social standing, with Warren E. Buffett on his I.M. buddy list. As any Buffett-phile knows, philanthropy stats are valued, too.
But A-Rod is a star constantly locked in a contradiction of conscience as evidenced by his charity. The homey surface of the AROD Family Foundation’s Web site, which promotes a slogan of helping “families in distress,” belies its cap on generosity.
Rodriguez has earned nearly $200 million over the past decade, but, according to 990 tax records dating to 1998, he is a cheap tipper to his foundation.
In eight years of available documents, donations averaged $30,000 a year and gifts distributed to the community averaged $13,000 a year. In 2002, A-Rod did not contribute more than $5,500. In 2006, the foundation did not give away more than $5,090 despite a fund-raiser that collected $368,000.
He isn’t on the platinum level of athlete donors. Tiger Woods has seeded his foundation with millions. And he isn’t on par with his teammates. Derek Jeter may have his I.R.S. issues, but he has given a total of $2 million to his Turn 2 Foundation since 1998.
Maybe A-Rod is simply generous in private. Publicly, he has written vanity checks for causes. In 2002, he contributed $3.9 million to a scholarship fund and baseball stadium renovations at the University of Miami, where the practice facility is named Alex Rodriguez Park.
The site is near a splendid oceanside estate in Coral Gables that property records show Rodriguez purchased for $12 million in 2004. The manse’s value is down — like everything with an address in South Florida.
An economic swoon may mean nothing to the A-Rod Empire — or does it?
Did A-Rod opt out as a Yankee only to realize he needed a bailout?
It was a flipper’s heyday when A-Rod plunged into real estate. In August 2004, he wrote the foreword for a book by Dolf de Roos called “Real Estate Riches: How to Become Rich Using Your Banker’s Money.”
“When I landed my well-publicized 10-year, $252 million contract, I set about finding an investment vehicle that would ensure my financial fitness long after baseball,” Alex wrote, adding that de Roos’s book gave “me the confidence to form Newport Property Ventures. I began by investing in a small duplex in an emerging area of South Florida, which led to the acquisition of several other income-producing properties.”
He didn’t just acquire. He binged. Property records indicate A-Rod’s company paid $58.7 million for Tampa complexes between 2004 and early this year. Those same properties, according to the county appraiser, have a current market value of $46.3 million.
Slump? Remember, A-Rod never uses that word in baseball.
“I’d say the best way to sum it up in the apartment market is to say there are short-term challenges,” said Jay Crotty, a respected Tampa real estate investment adviser who has represented Rodriguez in transactions.
There is an apartment glut as condominiums left unsold are being rented. On the grounds of Newport Square, a property on Himes Avenue with Yankee-esque bunting on the fences, signs offer residents $350 for referrals.
Are Alex’s rent rolls covering company costs?
“I can’t speak for Alex, but I think he has made sound investment decisions,” Crotty said. “This is a minor blip in his eyes.”
His fortune is probably safe. But vacancies aren’t healthy for anyone’s bottom line.
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Some residents are eager to depart Rodriguez-ville. In a Web site that rates apartments, one exiting renter at Newport Villas wrote that since A-Rod “fired all the nice people in the office and his crew knows not a damn thing they are doing, I’m leaving. At least the old management would not have lost everybody’s rent. They sent me a letter stating they were evicting me five months after they lost my rent.”
Here is A-Rod, steeped in a paradox of principles, engaged in a corporate venture that binds the needy, the very same people his foundation was designed to help.
“As far as keeping the grounds clean, it’s fine,” said Horace Bacon, a resident of Normandy Park, a recent acquisition by Newport Property Ventures. “But the late fees? When I sign my next lease, it’s $100 for being a day late — a day. I don’t agree with that. So, you know, it’s not the outside of the apartment I’m worried about.”
Will A-Rod ever worry about what’s beneath a moneymaking veneer? Or will he forever be Mr. Potter in pinstripes?
