CEO Mark Vengroff discusses his ‘secret sauce’ on WSLR’s Peace and Justice Report.
By Johannes Werner and Tom Walker
Original Air Date: September 5, 2025
Mark Vengroff
Host: There’s affordable housing, there’s attainable housing, and then there’s workforce housing. Mark Vengroff is the go-to name when it comes to creating apartments for working people in this area. His company, called One Stop Housing, is on a roll. It already has some 4,000 apartments under management, and 1,000 more are currently underway. Vengroff sat for a one-hour interview with Tom Walker on WSLR’s Peace and Justice Report this week, and we bring you some nuggets from that conversation here.
Johannes Werner: One Stop Housing tries not to take any government subsidies, to keep things simple. The secret sauce of Vengroff’s approach is their low construction and maintenance cost. He helped start a network of maintenance businesses from scratch, and that tight-knit network, built up over years, paid off for their property maintenance business.
Then, he took that idea to construction. One Stop took a large stake in a luxury construction business he really liked. Luckily for him, the contractor really liked the idea of building for working families.
Mark Vengroff: We acquired his company— the majority portion—and we rebranded them under One Stop Housing Development & Construction, and since then, not only is he the general contractor, but we’re the licensed plumber, a licensed electrician, the licensed roofer. We’re going for our licensed fire. We’re building in all the trades, and we build in a full development team, so you typically find that our development costs are about 40% of what the market is.
Rendering of Forest Cove in Bradenton
JW: Among the projects underway is Forest Cove, a 156-unit apartment complex in Manatee County. Forest Cove is a joint venture with local employers, and the county recently approved that project for catalyst loans. In Venice, Vengroff is starting a similar venture with local employers, working with Mayor Nick Pachota, who also owns restaurants in the area. Then, there’s teacher housing One Stop is building in Arcadia, in rural DeSoto County, in cooperation with the Barancik Foundation. Another plan is to work with brokerage Michael Saunders, which owns land next to Payne Park in Sarasota, to build 46 apartments there, going mostly to law enforcement officers and their families.
Rendering of Sarasota Station
And finally, there’s Sarasota Station. That’s a 200-unit project off Fruitville Road near downtown Sarasota, put on the drawing board years ago by Mark Vengroff’s late father. Vengroff says groundbreaking for Sarasota Station is planned for November.
One of the aspects that made Sarasota Station finally come to fruition is the Live Local Act. Vengroff praises the new Florida law because it gives luxury developers the option to go really tall and dense. One Stop is partnering with a developer for the property on Fruitville Road fronting Sarasota Station.
Rendering of On the Park, near Payne Park in Sarasota
MV: We proud to say we’re the first ones to use Live Local in the city of Sarasota. We’re filing under Live Local, and that’s actually how we got Sarasota Station off the ground—The one on 2211 Fruitville, the one my father has been trying to get built forever. We’re using Live Local. We’re selling three acres on the front parcel and taking those three under Live Local. We’ve been starting now to partner with other developers that are high-end luxury townhome or home builders—to partner with them to help them get higher density. We become the affordable sector. We file together under Live Local. They give us bigger dollars for our participation, which then help additionally fund our affordable housing component, which gives us more margin to keep our rents even lower without government intervention. We’re playing on the system to take advantage of how to do the right thing.
JW: To listen to the full one-hour interview with Mark Vengroff, go to wslr.org, click on “archive,” and look for the latest edition of the Peace & Justice Report.
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.
