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Changes in Attitude, Changes in Altitude
Plumber-turned-developer Scinto flush again after trying times
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Business New Haven
7/14/97
By: Michael Gomez
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During the worst of Connecticut's commercial real estate hemorrhage, in 1990, Shelton developer Robert Scinto found himself foundering in a $500,000 a month bloodbath.
“Every day I cried like a baby,” recalls the 50-year-old Scinto. “I had 350,000 square feet of empty space and I was dying waiting for a lease to come back. I felt I was being tested. By God. So the only way to come out of it was to pray harder than everyone else.”
Faith, Scinto's never-say-die attitude, loyal friends and workers, and a lot of effort and long hours apparently worked.
For this developer, a one-time Bridgeport plumber and shoe clerk, is flush again, surfacing from the effluent society to a sweeter smelling career, and life.
He owns 28 office and industrial buildings in Fairfield County, encompassing some two million square feet of office and production space, worth some $200 million. He claims his occupancy rate is 87 percent. Add two more office buildings now rising in Shelton, with nearly 250,000 more square feet, and Scinto casts a lengthening development shadow across southern Connecticut.
He believes his buildings - particularly his Enterprise Corporate Towers complex in Shelton - are notable for their appearance, with artwork and sculptures and handsome lobbies and amenities inviting building occupants and their visitors. Moreover, Scinto's buildings sport free health clubs for building employees and onsite day-care centers.
Yet his values go considerably deeper than appearance's sake. He stays true to his blue-collar roots, whence he scrabbled upward like a latter day Horatio Alger. “I carry a toilet auger in the trunk of my car,” he says. “It reminds me where I came from.”
Of his 60 employees, 14 are in service. “Our goal is uncompromising service,” he offers. “Our maintenance people - our janitors - write a mission statement on how to serve their customers [tenants] better. We survey all our tenants each year. So when maintenance gets a ranking of 95 percent satisfaction or better, they each get a five-percent bonus.”
Born in Bridgeport and raised in Fairfield, Scinto started in real estate in the mid-1970s with a modest venture - renovating a three-family house in the Park City. This, while he was working as a licensed plumber.
“You gain a lot of respect for people when you clean out their johns,” he laughs. “And I learned humility doing that.” He also learned the basics of construction, during his three-family rehab job, and other technical aspects of the building trades.
And as a fledgling landlord, he honed the trait of persistence and the skill of calm, focused negotiation.
“If you can negotiate [getting a week's rent of $37.50] from a guy twice your age who's drunk out of his mind on a Friday night,” then it's easy to wrangle with corporate types in blue suits during the light of day.
“I used to say to them,” 'Hey - it's not my money. I got to give it to the bank.'”
That strategy doesn't work for Scinto any more, however. “My advantage now is that I own all this stuff. It's all my money.
“You have to stay focused and calm to get your money,” he insists. “Don't get mad or angry. Because each time the deal gets to another level, the next guy wants to get a bite out of the deal,” in the form of more attractive terms or extras.
That attitude carries over into other pursuits. An avid golfer, Scinto often plays with tenants or prospects. “You learn a lot about people as the game develops,” he says.
His fellow players also learn a lot about Scinto, too. “We play sixes [a betting format where each player in the foursome plays with each other player as partner for six holes]. That way I'm never against anybody. I can't have that desire to win all the time. And the guy's supposed to be having a good day.”
During night school at Sacred Heart University, where he was studying for a business degree, Scinto also sold shoes for eight years in the '70s in the now-defunct B.M. Reed's department store in Bridgeport. “That taught me how to be a salesman, how to close a transaction.”
But it was the Connecticut recession of the late 1980s and early 90s that really taught him how to succeed.
His development projects then were not as heavily leveraged as were many commercial properties funded by Connecticut's cozy, wink-and-a-nod banking environment of the late 1980s.
“The bottom of the market fell out, but I didn't owe that kind of debt,” he recounts. Scinto's intention was simply not to add to the burgeoning army of building shells that marched across the landscape. The surest way to attain and maintain solvency was to fill his buildings.
“I was here to meet people,” he says. “My whole approach was to ask them, 'What do I need to do to get you into this space?'”
He offered sweetheart leasing arrangements, some with escalator clauses that nudged the per-square-foot rent up by a dollar or two each year. “I still lost money into 1993,” he says, “but hey - half a loaf is better than no loaf.”
Many of his tenants remained loyal - and helpful, too. “One tenant says to me, 'Hey, Bob, you're a great landlord. I got permission from the home office to prepay our rent, if that'll help you.' I turned it down graciously.'” While Scinto appreciated the gesture, the amount offered in advance wasn't enough to provide substantial help. he explains.
“I worked around the clock and I wasn't afraid to ask for help, from God. I've been very religious all my life. I also had invaluable people who believed in me and stood by me.”
To pay his debts and remain in business, Scinto sold “all my houses and toys” in 1990, including a house in Aspen, a 28,000-square-foot mansion in Fairfield, Lear jet and a top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benz. “I learned that I have to be on the edge, but with my own money and not borrowed money.”
The recession and his own personal financial collapse changed him, Scinto recalls. “I let certain things die, like being recognized or being the biggest fish in the pond.”
He and his family now live in Milford, and Bob Scinto is proud that his Lexus' odometer boasts 120,000 miles. “I have a simple goal,” he laughs. “And that's to put 200,000 miles on that car and on any other car that I own.
“My make-up now is different,” he says. “It's to be filthy rich and not have a soul know about it.”
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