Mass. firm moving HQ to Charleston after $8.3M office, $12M hotel deals | Real Estate

A Massachusetts real estate businessman fed up with vagrants and crime at some of his Northeast apartment properties recently bought a downtown Charleston office building and is moving his headquarters to the Lowcountry.

He also added a Mount Pleasant hotel to his holdings.

Vaios Thomas Theodorakos, CEO of VTT Management, paid $8.3 million for the three-story, 27,291-square-foot office building at 525 East Bay St., according to Charleston County land records.

Theodorakos also owns several apartment developments in the Lowcountry and elsewhere.

He called Charleston “a place where people are friendly and polite … and no one is screaming at you” and pointed to the new acquisition as a modern structure with easy access on and off the peninsula.

“It just checked all the boxes for me,” Theodorakos said of the building that is being leased to other office users as well.

He also bought the Days Inn at 261 Johnnie Dodds Blvd. in Mount Pleasant for $12 million from Raaj Kumar Hotel Investments LLC, which paid $3.3 million for the 130-room hotel in 2003.

The businessman plans an extensive renovation and future rebranding of the nearly 3-acre hotel site at the base of the Ravenel Bridge.

Theodorakos said he is selling off many of his holdings in his former base in Framingham, a city just west of Boston, and moving his corporate office to the East Bay Street building. 

The self-made entrepreneur, who said he educated himself in the construction business with how-to books after high school, sent a letter to Framingham officials last June informing the town he had decided to leave and begged the city to do something about the homeless problem.

“Regretfully and sadly, VTT Management Inc. has started the process to remove its headquarters from the downtown area where we called home for 30 years,” Theodorakos wrote, according to the media outlet Framingham Source.

Theodorakos pointed to a perceived increase in the homeless population and their interaction with his workers and tenants as no longer conducive to his business.

“The occurrences in and around our downtown locations have severely damaged the ability for this company and its occupants to remain,” he wrote.

In an interview, Theodorakos pointed out his decision to exit his home state had been building up for some time.

“I didn’t just decide to leave one day,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for about three years.”

Theodorakos noted employees leaving work late in the afternoon, sometimes after dark during the winter, would often be badgered by the homeless begging for money. A representative of the city of Framingham declined to comment on VTT’s decision to leave.

The son of Greek immigrants, Theodorakos said he worked several jobs in high school and saved enough money to buy his first property when he was 18 in Massachusetts.

After that, he bought rundown properties in neighborhoods in his home state, fixed them up himself and rented them out.

His company, named for his initials, now owns more than 5,000 apartment units in nearly 30 multifamily properties in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and South Carolina.

“I love fixing properties and restoring old buildings,” he said. “I like providing housing and places for people to run their businesses. I enjoy the public. I still love every deal and every transaction.”