🔒Randy Salvatore recruits sons to modernize, streamline his growing multifamily development empire

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Randy Salvatore was a high school senior in 1986 when he bought his first rental property.

Salvatore, then 17, put down $7,000 earned through a paper route and mowing lawns to purchase the condo. He borrowed another $28,000 from Stamford-based First County Bank, where his youth basketball coach was treasurer. His father had to co-sign the loan.

From that early entrepreneurial spark, Salvatore has become one of Connecticut’s most prolific real estate developers. Over the past 28 years, his firm, Stamford-based RMS Cos., has built about 600 houses and condos, as well as 2,500 apartment units, with about 2,000 more either under construction or in active planning.

RMS lists 34 properties in its portfolio, including five boutique hotels — in Stamford, Norwalk, Danbury, New Haven and Hartford — as well as one upscale dormitory for UConn students in Stamford.

The company employs about 300 people.

After several years of fast-paced growth, Salvatore, 54, is looking to his two adult sons, who joined the company within the past two years, to innovate and modernize operations and help manage the business. This new blood, Salvatore said, will secure the company’s gains and solidify its foundations.

“The company has grown quickly,” Salvatore said. “I’m entrepreneurial and kind of always on to the next project. What they brought is a fresh set of eyes, fresh skill sets and fresh education of a modern way of doing things that either I don’t have, or I have overlooked to continue doing other projects.”

Salvatore’s oldest son, 28-year-old Brandon Salvatore, is a 2020 graduate of the Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. He joined RMS in February 2023 as director of hospitality, managing RMS’ hotels.

Twenty-six-year-old Kyle Salvatore, a 2021 Harvard University grad, joined in August 2023 as director of multifamily development and asset management, putting him near the helm of the company’s fast-growing apartment empire.

Snowballing development 

Randy Salvatore wanted to go into business for as long as he can remember and had a natural attraction to real estate development. It was something tangible, an investment he could literally see and touch.

“As opposed to a lot of things in business and finance that you just can’t,” Salvatore said. “It’s just numbers. I’m fortunate knowing what I wanted to do and being able to do it later.”

Like his sons, Salvatore is no academic slouch. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business in 1991. With the real estate market in turmoil, Salvatore took a job with accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand.

A year later, he joined brokerage firm William Pitt Real Estate in Stamford. He thought it was the best way to crack into the industry, a means of learning and making connections.

“It was a lot of knocking on doors and getting doors slammed in your face,” Salvatore recalled. “It was a lot of cold calls because you don’t have any relationships.”

Working solely on commission, Salvatore made $12,000 his first year.

“I was wondering: ‘What am I doing here?’” Salvatore said. “But I was learning a lot, and things were starting to click.”

At the end of 1994, Salvatore closed a 17,000-square-foot office lease in Stamford that came with a $75,000 commission. He finally had capital to begin acting on development plans he’d been fostering.

Knowing little about construction, Salvatore had previously investigated the budding field of modular housing, including visits to factories where homes were pre-assembled.

Salvatore, then 25, paid $70,000 for an eighth-of-an-acre in a middle-class residential area of Stamford and put up a modular single-family house. He did the painting and landscaping himself and hired tradespeople for the rest. That time, he borrowed $110,000 from First County Bank.

Salvatore sold the property six months later for $254,000 and immediately invested the proceeds into building another house. In 1996, Salvatore formed his own brokerage outfit, RMS Real Estate Group, which still handles his company’s brokerage needs.

The development side of Salvatore’s endeavors snowballed as he rolled profits into larger projects. He began building two houses at a time and grew from there, taking on as much debt as he could as he built and sold properties to raise capital for the next project. At one point he had $46,000 on several credit cards.

“That was always the path, just had to build it to sell it to do more,” Salvatore said.

A pivot

RMS’ first multifamily project came in 2002, when Salvatore put up a 10-unit condo building in Stamford. Again, First County was his lender.

Salvatore continues to use the $2.4 billion-asset mutual bank. It financed $20 million of his $50 million, 228-unit “Asher” apartment building, which was completed in downtown Stamford this spring.

In 2010, Salvatore pivoted away from a languishing condo market to focus on development and management of rental properties. His hotel arm got off the ground two years earlier, with a partnership to buy and remodel the struggling Stamford YMCA’s rental housing property.

After consulting with a hotel expert, Salvatore decided to transform that portion of the YMCA building into a boutique hotel. He learned the hospitality trade as he operated the hotel through the 2008 financial crisis.

Today, much of Salvatore’s focus is on multifamily development. He is working on a 237-unit apartment building and associated parking garage on a 5-acre lot just southwest of Hartford’s Dunkin’ Park minor league baseball stadium. He estimates development costs of up to $70 million.

RMS is putting up a roughly $75 million, 204-unit apartment building at 370 West Ave., in Norwalk. The firm is also nearing completion of a $30 million, 112-unit building at 188 Lafayette St., in New Haven. That project is the last phase of a five-year effort to build 650 apartments in the “City Crossing” development.

RMS is building a 134-unit, $65 million apartment building in White Plains, New York. And in Stamford, RMS is working its way through permitting a 280-unit multifamily building in downtown Stamford, which Salvatore expects will cost more than $100 million to build.

Like father, like sons

Brandon and Kyle Salvatore grew up around job sites. They’ve known RMS’ longest-serving employees since they were children.

The brothers said they never felt pressured to go into the family business, but were drawn to development and real estate regardless.

“His advice was you need to find out what you love to do,” Kyle Salvatore said. “I think it was part of our family’s DNA, that entrepreneurial spirit and growing a business for yourself. Brandon and I grew up in the context that whatever we did, it had to be something we loved, and ultimately, we would want to help build a business or build it ourselves.”

After college, Brandon Salvatore spent three years working for the lodging capital markets team of real estate services firm Newmark in New York, before deciding to go to work with his father for a more “hands-on” experience. He was attracted by the potential to help oversee expansion.

Brandon Salvatore said he’s spent his time with RMS learning about and standardizing its operations. The firm is looking to add to the technology base of its hotels, including features like mobile check-in.

The company just rolled out a streaming platform that allows guests to connect their online video streaming services to the hotels’ televisions.

On the multifamily side, Kyle Salvatore said he sees growth potential in affordable housing. It’s a growing need that the government is increasingly supporting.

“Because we have the capacity to build, manage and own it ourselves, we should be more involved,” Kyle Salvatore said. “Communities are desperately calling for us. I think it’s a natural progression we want to get into.”

Kyle Salvatore’s first job out of college was as a consultant with Ernst & Young, advising on large-scale government infrastructure projects. After about a year, he joined his brother as a broker at Newmark, where he focused on office and multifamily investment sales. Their offices were on the same floor.

At Newmark, Kyle Salvatore said he developed a passion for real estate. He left the company after a year to join RMS.

“If RMS didn’t exist, both me and Brandon would probably do exactly what we are doing now by ourselves,” Kyle Salvatore said. “So, it made a lot of sense for us to join.”