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Business New Haven
7/9/2001
By: Michael C. Bingham
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If you expect to keep up with Bob Scinto for any length of time, you had better get a move on.
Because Bob Scinto is in a hurry. On this day in particular, he's in a hurry to get his inaugural foray into the restaurant business, the opulent Il Palio, open for business in time for its first private booking, on July 16.
To a visitor on this sunny late June day, that seems highly improbable. But Scinto has built a career on making the improbable a reality.
“See how nice the sun is on this façade here?” he says proudly. “We're building, probably, Connecticut's best restaurant,” Scinto says of the site. To the untrained eye it appears many weeks from completion - but its essential elements are the stuff of legend.
“We've got all French limestone,” Scinto describes the building's exterior. “Inside we've got wormy chestnut, granite, leather - nothing but the very best materials. Incredible.”
The restaurant, on the south side of Corporate Drive in Shelton, is named after a winner-take-all horse race through the streets of Siena, Italy. Scinto has never attended the race itself [although as a lover of fine art, he's certainly visited Italy], but the idea of it captured his imagination. Still, why would Connecticut's most successful developer want to get into the high-attrition restaurant business?
“There's not the economics to support this type of investment,” he acknowledges. “No one would do what I'm doing here and think they're going to make money as a restaurant. It's impossible.”
To Robert D. Scinto, Il Palio makes sense “only because it's an amenity to the complex,” he says. “The purpose of it is to give my tenants, in this park, a great place to do business and promote their companies to prospective customers. They walk in [and the maitre d'] goes, 'Mr. Smith, your table is waiting for you.' All of a sudden, Mr. Smith is a more important person. And when he can just sign his name on the ticket and get a bill - again, he's a more important person. It helps him promote his business.
“And that's my job - to be a partner to my tenants.”
A modest guy from Bridgeport who began his working life as a plumber, Scinto's first foray into real estate was itself pretty modest, too: In 1971, he bought a three-family house at 1335 Park Avenue in Bridgeport. He was 23 years old.
“I was going to get married the next year and I needed a place to live,” he recalls. “Being a plumber, I was able to fix it up at night. I put in all new bathrooms, a new heating system - in all I spent about $15,000. I was able to get the rents up to $150 a month.
“I remember saying to the real-estate agent who sold me the house, 'You know, I've got $10,000 or $15,000 in this now - do you think I could get a home-improvement loan or something?'” Scinto recounts. “[The broker] says, 'Why don't you just refinance it - get a new mortgage - because you've created value that you didn't have before.' So I went in and got a new mortgage - and that's when I realized that I had something to offer: I was able to create equity, create value, through my work.”
This was a key revelation in the young man's life. Beyond getting his cash outlay back, “From that point on I realized I was in a business where I could create the value and basically have no money in the transaction because I have created [value] through my work, organizational skills - those kinds of things,” Scinto says.
That experience emboldened Scinto to buy, rehab and manage several rooming houses. In 1975, he undertook his first foray into new construction, building an apartment building in the Park City. By 1979 he was prepared - psychologically and financially - to make his first leap into semi-big-time commercial development, erecting a 40,700-square-foot mixed-used (office, manufacturing and shipping) building at 30 Lindemann Drive near the intersections of Routes 8, 15 and the Merritt in Trumbull. Even though he built it for a client, Angel Engineering, Scinto maintained ownership of and management responsibilities for the property - as he does today.
Even so, up until 1982 he still went to work every day - in his plumber's clothes.
Bob Scinto still owns and manages 30 Lindemann Drive - and 31 other commercial properties, housing close to two million square feet, in Shelton, Trumbull, Fairfield and Wilton. And as he owns and manages each of the properties he does business each month with 235 commercial clients - not a one of which Scinto takes for granted.
The centerpiece of the Scinto empire is the sprawling Enterprise Corporate Towers - a six-building, 1.2 million-square-foot corporate Valhalla that commands a southern Shelton hillside just west of Route 8. At the summit, the three Corporate Drive buildings virtually give Shelton a skyline and have attracted major tenants such as Prudential and American Skandia, as well as collateral commercial development including Hilton, Sheraton and Ramada hotels, restaurants and the like.
Scinto likes to see himself less as a landlord than as a partner to his tenants. The well-appointed (fountains, grand pianos) three-story marble foyers greeting visitors to One and Two Corporate Drive make powerful quality statements about the companies headquartered there. “I've got one focus,” Scinto says. “To build beautiful buildings.”
Amenities such as on-site day care, a well-furnished health club, fine artwork (the giant outdoor replica of Michelangelo's David got Scinto in hot water when it was unveiled, for the questions its anatomical correctness might inspire in children) and even a full-sized outdoor basketball court with glass backboards, make workers relish coming to work at the lush campus. Why, Scinto even throws an annual picnic for his tenants and their employees, complete with live music and high-end eats.
Scinto has 235 tenants. How does he find them - or vice-versa?
“Reputation,” he explains. “You get tenants from your existing tenants. The way you treat your existing tenants - with dignity, honesty and hard work - they talk about you. And then other people want to be your tenants.
“We treat tenants totally differently than anyone else treats tenants,” Scinto says. “No one in this organization can say 'no' to a tenant. If they think a 'no' has got to be said, they have to come and see me, and then we'll figure out a way to say 'yes.' That's how we do it.”
Scinto expands on this theme: “If I have two phone calls coming in and one is a tenant who's paying me $12,000 a month, and another is a prospective tenant who wants to look at my building - I always talk to that guy who's a tenant, first.
“The philosophy is: Be grateful for what you have. Don't take people - don't take tenants - for granted. When I give someone a tour of the complex, I put the same effort into a 1,000- or 2,000-[square-foot] tenant as I do into a 20,000- or 30,000-[square-foot] tenant. To be successful, you have to learn to be consistent.”
Sounds like a pretty good philosophy. “Yeah, but it's not practiced by most people.,” Scinto says. “Whoever hired you and convinced you to come to work for them at Business New Haven - when you come on board, after a week or so they walk right by you in the hallway and they don't even say, 'Good morning.'
“We don't allow that to happen here.”
Looking tanned and fit, Scinto this day is dressed in polo shirt, khakis and loafers. “I'm dressed down today,” he explains unapologetically, “because I'm going to take a tenant on my boat” moored a few miles south in Stratford near the mouth of the Housatonic. “I have a beautiful boat and I make myself available to entertain tenants when they have important customers [visiting].
“My focus is to grow my tenants,” says the man who would be their “partner.” “If a tenant has an important customer and he wants to entertain them on the water, I want to be the captain.” Scinto did 48 such excursions with tenants last year. “That's a lot of boating,” he says.
From its headwaters in the Berkshire foothills, the Naugatuck River wends its way south parallel to Route 8. Where it flows into the Housatonic River for the last eight miles of its journey to Long Island Sound is where Derby and Shelton face each other across the waterway.
It's an easy stone's throw from one riverbank to the other side. But since the Housatonic defines the boundary between New Haven and Fairfield counties, the economic and cultural divide between the two Valley communities is a yawning one - and growing greater all the time.
As the sole Fairfield County representative of that amorphous collection of communities known as “the Valley” (if one is to accept the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce definition, the group includes, north to south, Beacon Falls, Oxford, Seymour, Ansonia, Derby and Shelton), Shelton's corporate vitality to a great extent drives the Valley's economic train. It surely was a key reason the Valley chamber (which is headquartered in Shelton) was able last year to earn All-America “City” honors for its mini-region from the National Civic League.
But there's a reason Bob Scinto chose literally to transform the landscape of Shelton, while never so much as contemplated doing a project just 300 feet away in Derby.
“I picked Shelton because Shelton is just a spectacular place to do business,” Scinto says. “The building inspectors are cooperative - lovely people. The zoning people, if you do a first-class job, will work with you. There's no monkey business in this town.” He adds, “You don't find that every place.”
Are there those who might seek to put a brake on Shelton's development boom? “Not when they pay their taxes,” says Scinto. “Okay? Every one of these buildings will support ten or 15 teachers.”
Plus, Shelton offered companies a Fairfield County address without the typical Fairfield County labor and housing costs. “Salaries in the Shelton market are 25 percent less than in lower Fairfield County - and far less than in New York City,” a Scinto marketing piece says.
So, why hasn't Shelton's development boom continued north up the Valley? The magic of a Fairfield County address, plain and simple.
“I advertise this as a Fairfield County address,” Scinto says. “Shelton is in Fairfield County. It's address; it's values. You don't have that in the rest of the Valley. Once you leave Shelton, you're now in New Haven County. Once you're in New Haven County, you could be any place.”
Could Scinto's success in Shelton be replicated farther upriver?
“What these towns up the Valley need to do is to try to develop very good residential housing - apartments,” Scinto says. “Derby could allocate a large piece of property, allow apartment zoning there, and subsidize that by buying the land and not charge any [property] tax for five years. As soon as they do that, it brings in people with spendable income - professional people will begin to live there, and maybe take a train to [jobs in] Stamford.
“You keep building apartments, and in ten years you have 5,000 or 7,000 new people in downtown Derby. That's when you're going to see a Starbucks, you're going to see restaurants, you're going to see retail stores. You need to change the image of the town.”
That's because for Bob Scinto, images are important. “As a very young person, I imagined that I was going to become rich, and very successful,” he says. “Imagine yourself as a successful person. Close your eyes: Imagine yourself as a good father, or a good husband. Become a good father and a good husband. It starts with what you see in your own mind.
“And then you make it a reality.”
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