Years After Retirement, Converted Met 1st Baseman/Now Real Estate Developer Still Hitting Home Runs In NYC

In New York City, Crain's Bew York Business reports:

• Six months after Mo Vaughn set up Omni New York in 2004, the fledgling real estate firm struck, snapping up a 286-unit affordable housing complex in the Bronx. By the end of its second year, Omni New York had tripled its holdings to a total of 869 units.

• As far as most people were concerned, however, Mr. Vaughn was still a Mets first baseman, even though his baseball career ended in 2003. “I wanted people to take us seriously and know that we were the real deal,” says Mr. Vaughn, who is seated at a Brooklyn eatery with his partner, Eugene Schneur, explaining his transition from baseball hero to real estate mogul—albeit one whose new uniform includes not just sharply tailored suits but large diamond-encrusted hoop earrings. “I wanted respect.”

• These days he's got it—not as the American League's former MVP but as the managing director of one of the city's best-regarded and most active buyers and managers of affordable housing. Along the way, Mr. Vaughn and company have earned a place as one of the city's top choices for turning around distressed residential properties.(1)

For more, see Mo Vaughn's home runs (Builds affordable-housing empire scooping up distressed properties).

(1) After the foreclosure mess left by the "white shoe," predatory equity, Wall Street types who, as "wet-behind-the ears" real estate investors, grossly overpaid for multi-unit apartment buildings throughout New York City just before the real estate bubble burst, there should be no shortage of old, deteriorating residential buildings in need of rehab for Vaughn and his partner to sift through and pick from for their firm's future projects.