- May 14, 2026
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Despite the breadth of its mission — building affordable rental workforce housing throughout Florida — One Stop Housing actually started as a family business. Harvey Vengroff, Mark’s father, was a heavyweight in the Sarasota affordable housing scene and when he died in 2018 some of his last few words to his son were to encourage him to grow the business.
“He believed that anyone who works deserves a clean, safe, affordable roof over their head without any government subsidies,” Vengroff says. “...I came on board about nine years ago to carry the torch of his vision, and since then, we’ve just been blowing it out.”
In that time, Vengroff, 60, has expanded the Sarasota-based business all over the Sunshine State, with more than 4,000 units in use and roughly 1,100 in the pipeline. One Stop Housing has some 175 employees and its property management and development/construction units combined for $154.5 million in revenue last year.
Since coming on board, the CEO has steadily ensured more of the business be handled in house, acquiring a construction company and starting a nonprofit under the blanket umbrella of One Stop. The company has done some work out of Florida, too, in Memphis.
“We built out all the verticals throughout the entire process with a hyperfocus of making it so affordable to buy, build and manage, that we’d be able to keep the rents low and still make a profit,” he says.
Vengroff started his career working for his father’s international debt collection agency. When that business sold, he went into advertising, but at a certain point, he received the fateful call. Father was ready for son to take over what had started as his retirement project.
“It was just kind of a habit,” Vengroff says. “He starts it and then I take it over and blow it up.”
“We have about 1,100 units coming on board, and we’ll have another 800 or so right behind that,” Vengroff says. “We’re looking for some very large, double-digit increases in our business. I see the outlook as very strong, because the need is not going away. It’s only getting worse. The more people migrate into the area, the more need there is for true workforce housing. And we’re the only ones providing workforce housing in the state of Florida that I’m aware of that’s not taking subsidies — they’re really serving the very underserved but not the true missing middle. So we’re it.”
And there’s more vertical expansion coming. “We’re starting a logistics company, and we’re getting a few more of our licenses. Right now, we’re licensed plumbers, electricians and roofers. So we’re going to get our fire and site license. It continues to grow.”
Vengroff doesn’t subscribe to the tipping point idea, at least as it relates to his business. Instead, he prefers to follow a well-honed technique: the one-click rule. He conjures the image of a volume dial, with notches from one to 10. In a business, if you go too quickly from one side to the other, you risk losing people, Vengroff says. But if you work your way slowly up the dial, recalibrating and checking in at every step, you have a better chance of getting to the end goal successfully and with the original team still intact.
“In a prior career, I had built what I believed was an incredible technology, because I knew that’s what our clients needed at the time. And I spent quite a bit of money and effort and time building this perfect model only to find out, when I got my first customer, that they wanted something completely different. So then I revised the whole thing we did and we learned a lot along the way, but the theory of ‘build it and they will come’ doesn’t work.”
“Now what we do, I learned very much from that, is to know who your audience is and work with your potential client, which in this case are our residents. A lot of times, when we build in a neighborhood, we call the president of the community association, invite them in and have them work and collaborate with us as we’re building and designing a new building. So we’re building it with our clients in mind, alongside them, rather than trying to build it and think someone is going to want it.”
Vengroff lists cultural fit as the No. 1 characteristic.
“We pay well but we don’t pay great, and we really help the people here build generational wealth over the long haul, but it doesn’t start off that way,” he says. “So it’s not for everybody. You really have to believe in the mission.”
On the flip side, Vengroff is succinct with what he considers an immediate turnoff in hiring: “laziness.” In general, he relies on three key values when evaluating candidates: “trust, tribe and transparency.”
“I just don’t want to get a phone call that anyone got hurt on a job or on the property. They’re almost like a family — you worry about them. And sometimes people are really eager. Someone will climb on the roof when they shouldn’t. …I’m not a big worrier, but I probably worry about them more.”
