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It's no game to her
The 25 properties Maryann Lynch owns in downtown St. Petersburg - named after Monopoly properties - are much more than investments to her.
By LEONORA LaPETER
Published July 26, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Sometimes in the middle of the night, Maryann Lynch clambers up the fire escape to the roof of one of her buildings. In the darkness above the streetlights, she scans the downtown horizon for what she calls her "children."
She has 25 of them - apartment buildings, single-family homes, boardinghouses, duplexes, triplexes, vacant lots - all with names straight off a Monopoly board.
Her attachment is deeply emotional, which explains why she won't sell any of them. Never. Ever. No matter what. Even if the price were a hundred gazillion dollars.
That even goes for the nightmare on Fifth Street S - Park Place - the one that's costing her $900,000, the black sheep that dragged her name through the mud. Even that one.
She won't budge for any Eckerd or Sembler or whatever townhome developer comes along with a hefty offer, won't even listen. She throws their unopened letters in the garbage, ignores their phone calls, posts "keep out" signs at her office door.
She said it would be like looking at a price tag on a kid. Like she's gonna do that? Yeah, right.
* * *
"Check out this hardware! Are you dying?" Lynch said, caressing an original glass door knob and metal plate on a bedroom door in one of her Pacific apartments. "Doesn't it rock?"
Her sea green eyes are wide, like an 8-year-old recounting her first ride on a Ferris wheel.
All her properties excite her. At Marvin Gardens, she recounts how she salvaged the wall sconces from the dirt beneath the house and brought them back to life. At Park Place, it's the layers of paint she loves, sanded down and mottled-like.
Few think it's worth buying St. Petersburg's old buildings and restoring them to their former glory. Fewer still have done it on the scale that Lynch has.
She is 43. When she was 32 and married a few years, Lynch and her husband bought a burned-out house in Dallas for $5,000, and in a few years, parlayed it into $160,000. She did the same with another house, a five-plex and duplex.
She moved to Florida in 1995 and began snuffing out the for sale signs in a neighborhood south of downtown St. Petersburg called University Park, where many of the buildings were boarded-up.
She grabbed up apartment buildings and boardinghouses, the ones the banks wouldn't even consider financing. The more burned out, the better. She would buy low, fix them up, rent them and move on to the next. When she ran out of money to buy, she turned backward, pulling the equity out of her earlier properties and plowing it into the next one.
Over and over, she applied her formula. Now she has 25 properties and more than 150 tenants, whom she calls "tenant children."
"These buildings are what make her herself," said Cari Hennig, Lynch's property manager. "It's hard to explain unless you've known her, but if anything happened to one of these buildings, she'd be internally crushed."
Lynch paid $75,000 in 1996 for the 18-unit brick building on Fourth Avenue S that she calls Boardwalk. The entryway is a path of multicolored tiles mixed in with a pair of dice, the iron, the top hat and the race car - a testament to her passion for playing Monopoly on the grandest of scales.
* * *
Boardwalk commands rents of $385 to $550. It may be her shining star, but Baltic Apartments, where rents are $650 to $695, is her baby.
She chose the two-story building's china red french doors, canary yellow second-floor railing, cobalt blue tiles and galvanized metal roofing on the front of the building. She glued her beloved Teletubbies - all four of them in plastic relief - to the yellow railing.
Maybe the combination sounds horrifying, but as her property manager points out, it always comes together in the end.
How much does it cost her to do all this? Lynch shrugs her shoulders, has no idea.
There's no method to her madness. She might ferret a funky light fixture out of a flea market for just dollars, she might lay down $10,000 for a metal railing.
When she runs out of money, she turns to her bank for more, using her equity again and again.
She runs her business, Times Square Properties, out of her checking account and can't tell you how much her debt is or how much she has sunk into any one building. Needless to say, she does not have a traditional business plan.
Inside the sterile confines of her banker's offices, her passion is her sales pitch, and her properties command appraisals with higher and higher dollar amounts to back it up. "She (at United Bank) asked for these pro forma things and I'm like, "come on.' "
Lynch once came to the bank seeking about $600,000 to renovate Park Place, which the city had condemned and was going to tear down if she didn't fix it fast. A loan officer remarked that she would have to pull off a pretty good dog and pony show to get that much.
Lynch came back with, what else, a dog and pony. The rented pony was topped by her tiny white Maltese, Amstel, and followed by an employee with a pooper-scooper. The bankers smiled - and gave her the loan.
Said Susan Blackburn, the bank's senior vice president for sales and marketing: "She truly is the most creative presenter of a business plan that United has ever seen."
* * *
At an antiques store on Central Avenue, a friend recently found a Michelob Light mirror and brought it to Lynch. On it is a picture of a 20-something Lynch, with big hair, a lightning bolt necklace and a mug of beer.
A model for 13 years, she traveled from Japan to Australia and hundreds of places in between. She made the cover of Complice, a Spanish magazine, and her credits include commercials for Nissan, L'Oreal, Pizza Hut, Winn-Dixie and Kmart.
She had little passion for the work. A tomboy at heart, she hated the dresses. She still has the figure, size 4, 24-inch waist, a personal trainer on hire.
Though she demonstrates a savvy, some would say, almost brilliant business sense, Lynch, who has never been to college, exhibits the innocence and naivete of a school girl. Think Jessica Simpson meets Florence Griffith Joyner.
Lynch is into $299 rolling stainless steel sinks for Park Place because of the "coolness factor." She doesn't read about designing; she looks at the pictures.
She has never voted, doesn't plan to, and keeps her mouth shut when the discussion turns to politics.
One day a vehicle fashioned like a piggy bank trailing two piglets drove by. Lynch jumped in her Dodge Ram pickup truck and chased the pig down to Central Avenue and some Iraq war protesters.
"So, I roll down my window and I'm like, "I don't get the pig,' " Lynch recalls. "So she says, "We're wasting $20-million on the Iraq war and it should be spent on our children's education.' And then the guy chirps up and he's like, "You really don't get it?'
"So then the lady goes, "We're against people like you with your big gas-guzzler trucks,' and I said to her, "Well I bet your pig uses way more gas than my truck.' I don't know who these pig people were but she was really mean."
Lynch said people have told her that she has attention deficit disorder, but she has never been diagnosed with it.
One minute, she talks about the time a worker threw a "big old chair from the 1940s" over the balcony of one apartment, hitting her in the back of the head and flattening her to the pavement. That segues into a story about how two tenants in Boardwalk married and had a baby. Which leads to the time she held a homeless guy who kept breaking into Boardwalk at gunpoint while her young daughter scolded him.
She mimics a 6-year-old voice: "Why are you breaking into my mommy's buildings?"
* * *
Lynch's current problem child is Park Place, at 305 Fifth St S. It has tested her like no other property, demonstrated why most developers buy old buildings, knock them down and start from scratch. She hasn't bought a building since 2000 because of it, though she doesn't plan to let it stop her from buying more in the future.
The city condemned Park Place three years ago, just after Lynch had pulled a load of equity out of her properties to pay off her husband in their divorce. At the time, she had mortgages totaling $1.2-million.
She's had trouble with contractors, mold and asbestos. At one point, she was accused of hiring homeless people to pull out the asbestos. She paid fines but said it was all just a mistake, they were just trying to remove junk from the apartments so the architect could do drawings.
Bob Jeffrey, the city's manager of urban design and historic preservation, said that Lynch is leaving St. Petersburg a legacy.
One day, Lynch and Jeffrey pulled up in front of Park Place.
He was wearing a periwinkle blue shirt. Lynch looked at him, looked at the building, looked back at him. Whenever she sees Jeffrey now, she pesters him for the shirt so she can take it to Home Depot and match it with the paint she wants to put on the building.
- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story. Leonora LaPeter can be reached at (727) 893-8640.
[Last modified July 25, 2004, 23:46:08]
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