While the New York real estate world already knows Brooklyn developer and owner David Walentas, sports fans outside of Dumbo may just be getting acquainted.
Walentas and his son, Jed, last month placed a $100,000 deposit with Major League Baseball for the right to bid on the Washington Nationals, the National League franchise now owned by MLB, which moved it this season from Montreal, where the team played as the Expos.
The Walentas bid, which involved teaming with Washington-area investors, pushes the number of known bidders for the team to nine, including the Lerner family, the owners of a Bethesda-based real estate empire.
David Walentas and family are not the first real estate moguls to join the ranks of professional sports team owners, of course. Fellow Brooklyn developer, Bruce Ratner, bought the New Jersey Nets for $300 million and is building a Frank Gehry-designed, 800,000-square-foot Brooklyn arena for his new tall friends.
Fred Wilpon, co-founder and chairman of the board of real estate firm Sterling Equities, is also the chairman and CEO of the New York Mets. In 2000, Wilpon founded and became chairman of the Brooklyn Baseball Company, which owns the Brooklyn Cyclones.
In another N.Y.-to-D.C., real-estate-to-sports move several years ago, the Milstein family sought to buy the Washington Redskins. But the dynasty was less successful than the Walentas family hopes to be. Developer Howard Milstein eventually withdrew his $800-million bid for the team and sued two Redskins officials, saying they lobbied NFL owners against his offer.
He eventually lost the team to communications giant David Snyder and partners who included Mort Zuckerman head of REIT Boston Properties and another New York City real estate bigwig.
As of April 29, Major League Baseball hadn’t set any bid deadlines for the Nationals.