Rubin Margules
President, A.R.M. Capital Resources Corp.
Brooklyn, NY 11223
Phone (718) 339-8301
Bio
Rubin enjoys his work. But in public, he is reticent about what he does for a living, especially since 1980, when he ran in a primary for the State Assembly and an opponent held up his profession as evidence that he was unfit for public office. Mr. Margules is a landlord. He makes his living by buying, managing, and selling apartment buildings. Usually, he uses his own money and money from investors, whom he assembles into small corporations each time he spots a good deal. Sometimes, he buys by himself. After a group has bought a building, Mr. Margules (who uses that spelling even though he pronounces his name Mar-GO-lis) manages it for a fee equal to 5 percent of the rent roll. Usually, he also supervises major improvements, which raise the quality of housing for tenants and, under rent regulation, allow the owners to raise rents, giving them more income and increasing the value of the building.
The combination of buying, managing, and selling buildings makes him a real-estate operator, a threatened breed. He says higher rates and rent regulations make it harder and harder to operate profitably. Owners with much larger holdings used to operate similarly, but nowadays sales are frequently for the purpose of conversion to cooperatives rather than rental operations. While there is no such thing as a typical landlord - they range from people who live in half of a two-family house and rent out the other, to owners whose accounting departments look like the back office of a small bank - Mr. Margules could be called middle-sized.
At the moment he operates 16 buildings with 1,500 apartments. Most are postwar brick structures of four to six stories, each with an elevator and resident superintendent. Some have a part-time doorman.
Three are in New Jersey, two are on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the rest are in Brooklyn, mostly in the Flatbush and Sheepshead Bay sections. They are primarily in middle-class neighborhoods that are predominantly white. To prevent blight from creeping to the doorstep of one building, Mr. Margules bought an adjacent commercial building with four storefronts damaged by fire so that he could return them to use.
