“We’re Not Sharks”: Next Gen Mandy Aims To Do Better

Inside a Wallace Street warehouse filled with refrigerators and stoves and plywood and snow blowers and water heaters and closet doors and toilets and sheetrock, Yudi Gurevitch engaged in the latest step of retooling, and rebuilding the reputation of, one of New Haven’s largest landlord empires. He wedged himself in between two shelves overflowing with plumbing supplies and lifted up one of dozens of plastic-wrapped SharkBite fittings.

“The goal is to have everything you could ever need for a property management company in stock,” he said. That way, when a Mandy Management property needs repairs — big or small, day or night — his company has the right parts ready to go.

Gurevitch is the 29-year-old CEO of Mandy Management, a property management company-real estate investment outfit-megalandlord that through its many affiliates is one of the largest private residential rental property owners in town.

The company, which was founded by Yudi’s father Menachem Gurevitch a quarter-century ago, controls more than 4,000 apartments across roughly 800 buildings in New Haven, West Haven, East Haven, and Hamden, according to Gurevitch.

And that’s just counting its New Haven area holdings. Mandy also owns and manages properties in Atlanta, Georgia and Florida. Its parent company is Netz, a commercial real estate investment firm that used to be — but no longer is — traded publicly on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Yudi Gurevitch took over the company’s New Haven-based operations roughly five years ago, and is responsible for its roughly 50 employees and thousands of apartments and all of the work that comes with running such a large operation. That work includes new leases, renewals, apartment ​“turnovers,” maintenance, and compliance with city housing code and all of the paperwork and inspections that come with receiving federal Section 8 rental subsidies, which Gurevitch estimated apply to up to 40 percent of Mandy’s New Haven apartments.

The company has come under criticism over the years for the conditions of its properties and dealings with tenants. Yudi Gurevitch said he has worked hard to turn around that reputation by making the company work better — and on a recent Friday took the Independent around town to give examples.

Gurevitch spent nearly two hours with this reporter providing a tour of Mandy’s main offices at 399 Whalley Ave. and its two warehouses on Wallace Street. He made available roughly a dozen fellow Mandy employees for interviews along the way, and answered every question posed by the Independent about Mandy’s day-to-day operations, business practices, and goals — all with the intention of providing this reporter, Independent readers, and the New Haven public with a clearer understanding of how Mandy works, from Mandy’s perspective.

He also wanted to emphasize the changes he said Mandy has made in recent years to become a more responsive and responsible company — one that is better prepared to tend to the needs of its properties, to care for the housing wellbeing of its residents, to act on the orders of city housing code inspectors, to remain rooted in New Haven for years to come.

“The biggest misconception [about Mandy Management] is that we’re a company that’s in it only for the profit, and that we’re a faceless company and we don’t care about our tenants,” Gurevitch said. ​“That we don’t take care of our properties.”

That is not true, Gurevitch said. Mandy does care about its apartments. It does care about the people who live in its buildings. And, he said, under his leadership over the past half-decade, it’s worked hard to bring on the right staff and put in place the right property maintenance protocols and stock up on the right supplies — as evidenced by those two Wallace Street warehouses, SharkBites and all.

“The thing I’m most proud of,” he said about his tenure at the helm of the company, ​“we changed our entire perspective. We put a huge focus, and today [that] remains the main focus of Mandy Management, on customer service. We want our tenants, our residents to be happy, to feel safe, to have a good home. We understand it’s not just an apartment, it’s a house they’re living in. It’s home for them. And the main thing is we want them to feel that we’re responsive, that we’re there. Because we are.”

"We're Not Hiding"

For more than a decade, Mandy Management has expanded at a clip that outpaces any other private real estate actor in New Haven — tapping a seemingly bottomless flow of cash from major commercial lenders and private investors to buy up more and more of New Haven’s mostly low-income housing stock. 

The company has come under fire from tenants and legal aid lawyers for being the busiest filer of eviction lawsuits in town, from housing code inspectors and state prosecutors and fair rent commissioners for delayed repairs to dangerous living conditions at its properties, from affordable housing nonprofit leaders and other close watchers of New Haven’s real estate market for becoming too big and monopolistic.

Gurevitch countered those critiques during his recent interview with the Independent, arguing that his company has both turned a corner and remains largely misunderstood by critics.

The company has never been shy about identifying which New Haven apartment buildings are Mandy Management properties. It places Mandy-branded signs on the sides of buildings stretching from downtown to Newhallville to the Hill to the Annex to Fair Haven to Westville to Edgewood to East Rock and everywhere in between.

Their main office is also in a prominent spot on one of New Haven’s main drags, Whalley Avenue near Norton, for all to see. According to Gurevitch, Mandy’s New Haven-area properties are almost all occupied, with a vacancy rate of around 2.5 percent. He said, for the most part, Mandy residents are happy living in the apartment buildings they’re in.

Gurevitch emphasized that Mandy’s visibility has been an important part of its business in the past, remains so today, and will continue to be so for many years in New Haven to come. 

“We put signs on our properties. We’re out there,” Gurevitch said. ​“We’re not hiding.”

As for Mandy’s property upkeep record, Gurevitch noted that his company has not been fined in criminal housing court for persistent housing code violations in a year and a half. Click here to read about $5,250 in fines that Gurevitch’s father, who is listed as the principal on the Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) that legally own Mandy-run properties in New Haven, was hit with in housing court in May 2022. 

Yudi Gurevitch said that there’s a reason why Mandy has not been back in court. That’s because if the city’s housing code enforcement agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), tells Mandy to make a fix or points out a code violation, the company addresses the matter promptly.

LCI Deputy Director Mark Stroud, who oversees the department’s housing code inspection agency, agreed with Gurevitch in a comment provided to the Independent for this story. 

“By and large, our inspections have found most of Mandy Management’s apartments to be in compliance with the city’s minimum housing quality standards, and when a unit is not in compliance, they are responsive and promptly address any related issues,” Stroud wrote.

“They also have a dedicated liaison to LCI, who is available 24/7 to respond to any emergency issues or complaints, which we appreciate so that we can ensure residents are living in safe and appropriate housing and conditions.”

Indeed, while Mandy has not been in criminal housing court recently, LCI continues to bring another local megalandlord, Ocean Management’s Shmuel Aizenberg, to court time and time and time again to be fined for persistent housing code violations at his local rental properties. Aizenberg has also been selling off many of his New Haven apartment buildings all year as he faces more pressure from tenants unions and in housing court; Mandy has sold only a handful of properties in recent years. Otherwise, the company just continues to grow and grow.

"I Love Our Team"

Gurevitch, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, now lives in Beaver Hills — ​“in the Jewish community” — with his wife and two young kids. He moved to New Haven in around 2014 to start working for his father’s company.

Last Friday, Gurevitch took this reporter on a walkthrough of Mandy’s 399 Whalley office space, from the leasing area where new residents apply for apartments to a glass-wall-enclosed meeting room with a New Haven map on the table to the individual offices and cubicles of employees to a closet-sized room lined with lockers filled to the brim with brightly hued spare keys. 

He said there’s a backup key for each Mandy apartment in these lockers. One of the more challenging parts of running such a large property management business, he said, is the constant churn of locks and keys — as they are ​“always being changed” when tenants move out and new renters move in.

Gurevitch then drove this reporter in his Cadillac Escalade — with sunflower seeds by the front seat to munch on along the way — over to Wallace Street to check out Mandy’s two warehouses, which are brimming with appliances and cleaning supplies and materials for fixing up houses.

Some of the Mandy employees the Independent spoke with last Friday included leasing manager Seth Brummel, new-move-in coordinator Cynthia Villanueva, inspections administrator Jenny Torres, inspections manager Zalmy Weiss, office manager Yako Ma, lease renewals manager Stefany Falcon, warehouse managers Yuri Ess, fellow warehouse staffers Christian Fonseca and Ricardo Rosario, maintenance office manager Ebony Jenkins, and fellow maintenance office workers Mayra Campos, and Nicole Martinez. All spoke highly of their work, took pride in being a part of Mandy Management, and treated Gurevitch with an amiable respect.

“I love our team. I think we’ve got the best team. And we’re always looking to be better,” Gurevitch said. 

In the past, he said, Mandy had some employees who did not treat tenants with the level of respect they deserved. He said those employees are gone, and he’s prioritized hiring people who do treat others well and are good at what they do.

He said that Mandy has roughly 15 employees who work out of the 399 Whalley office, more than 20 who work in the maintenance department and warehouses on Wallace Street, and still more who are, for example, dedicated landscaping crew members or live-in building superintendents. He said Mandy’s 50-ish employees do not include all of the ​“subs” the business contracts with to help out with other more intensive repairs.

"If An Issue Comes Up, We Take Care Of It"

In his office on the Whalley Avenue side of Mandy’s single-story main office building, Gurevitch spoke about how he spent time working in every department at Mandy Management before taking over the business from his father.

When he moved to New Haven nine years ago, ​“my first job here was to board up all the windows in the basements” of multifamily properties because of a problem Mandy had with ​“people coming in and stealing copper piping.” He and a small crew drove across the city from property to property, boarding up basement windows, ​“painting them nicely, putting in new basement doors, installing locks and giving tenants keys if there were washers or dryers they needed to access.

“And then, slowly slowly, I started going into the turnovers and into the maintenance. Every department I looked into. I worked in every department as a manager” before taking over all of Mandy’s New Haven operations. He credited his time overseeing the company’s maintenance department as helping ​“me figure out exactly where improvements need to be made. When I did take this position of overseeing the entire operation, I was able to make changes” he had been thinking about for a while.

One of the changes Gurevitch is most proud of: putting in place a ​“phone stacking system” for tenant calls for service.

“We have three [phone] lines at the warehouse that are always open,” he said. ​“If for whatever reason all those three lines are taken when [a tenant calls] for a work order, it gets stacked. As soon as one line finishes the phone, right away it goes to the next.”

The goal of such a system, he said, is to ​“make sure that every single call gets answered. There’s no such thing as: ​‘I tried calling them and we couldn’t get a hold of them.’ There’s no such thing. If they call, they get answered.” Tenants can also submit maintenance requests through an online portal.

Gurevitch stressed that Mandy is ​“on call 24 – 7” for its tenants. The main office is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. ​“We have an after-hours service that kicks in at 5 p.m. and goes to 9 a.m.” If a tenant calls with an emergency maintenance matter at, say, 9 p.m., Mandy’s after-hour phone service takes the call and gets in contact with the relevant personnel via phone and email. Gurevitch said he personally is cc’d on every such after-hours maintenance email.

He pointed to one such email he recently received showing a call from 5:12 p.m. A tenant was having a problem with turning off her oven. The notice included information on the tenant’s name, phone number, address, what the issue was, and if Mandy maintenance workers had permission to enter the apartment. ​“That email goes out to our on-call maintenance secretary,” Gurevitch said, who then dispatches one of Mandy’s maintenance workers if it’s an emergency. ​“If it’s a non-emergency, we’ll create the work order and take care of it the next day.”

“We have a pretty low turnover rate,” Gurevitch said. ​“I think that’s because tenants are happy, our residents are fairly happy. They see the change that has been going on at Mandy Management over the last 10 years. They feel that we are responsive, that we’re always there, and that we’re always there to help. If an issue comes up, we take care of it. We never throw things on the back burner. Never.”

Fausto Hernandez, one of Mandy’s live-in superintendents, was busy mopping and cleaning up the interior entrance to Mandy’s 15-unit apartment complex at 285 Edgewood Ave. on Friday morning — a week after this reporter interviewed Gurevitch — when this reporter caught up with him.

Hernandez was born and raised in the Dominican Republican. He’s been working for Mandy Management for four years. He said he enjoys the job, and the company. 

“I’m happy with Mandy,” he said. He and his wife take care of 11 of Mandy’s New Haven rental properties as part of their jobs with the company. They cut the grass, clean the common spaces, and generally tend to the properties’ upkeep. 

“I’ve heard stories” about Mandy not being a responsible landlord, Hernandez said. ​“People have a lot to say.” But that hasn’t been his experience. Far from it. With ​“the son running the company, everything is different.”

Too Big? "We Are Not Shy Of Spending Money"

And what about tenant and public concerns that Mandy Management is just too big — that it has expanded at too torrid of a rate, that it doesn’t have enough staff to take care of all of its properties?

“We do have the staff,” Gurevitch said. ​“We have a great team. We are not shy of spending money. We spend money on our apartments. The amount of roofs we’ve done, window replacements, rehabs,” plumbing, electrical, even sidewalks. Gurevitch said it’s not uncommon for a broker to call him, ask if he wants to buy a house, he visits the property, and the house is in such poor condition it’s barely livable. 

When his company buys such properties, he said, it fixes them up. 

“We’re really invested in New Haven. We’ve been around for 25 years. We’re not here to make a quick profit. We’re here and we’re staying. We’re here for a long time. And I believe that the only way to survive is to provide good product and good customer service, and to have happy customers, to have happy residents. We want everybody to feel like we’re there for them, and that we’re answering the phone.”

Yes, he acknowledged, much of New Haven’s housing stock is quite old — with many two- and three-family houses dating back decades and decades. That’s true for many of Mandy’s apartment buildings.

At the prompting of LCI Executive Director Arlevia Samuel, Gurevitch said, his company is in the process of rolling out a ​“preventative maintenance” program. That means that, ​“instead of waiting for a tenant to call us to report an issue, we go through a list of our properties” with the goal of having a maintenance crew visiting each Mandy building at least once a year, ​“just to do a preventative well check.” To check the ​“furnaces, mechanicals, apartments,” and talk to tenants to see what needs to be fixed, from leaky faucets on up.

Gurevitch said Mandy has already done a ​“test run” of this preventative maintenance plan. ​“It’s in the works.”

As for when Mandy buys a new property — an expansion that has slowed this year as interest rates go up, but which has taken place on a near constant basis over the past five years — the company reviews everything from kitchens to bathrooms to plumbing and electrical to roofs. ​“We have a standard for what our properties should look like before we say it’s ready for a tenant to move in, and that standard is pretty high,” he said.

How are things between Mandy and LCI, the city’s housing code inspection and enfocement agency?

“I get along with everybody at LCI, all the inspectors,” Gurevitch said. ​“They know they have an open communication line with us, with me and Zalmy (Weiss, Mandy’s inspections manager). If there’s ever an issue that comes up, they call me. If it’s 12 o’clock at night, we answer the phone and send someone out.”

Gurevitch said that LCI’s inspectors can speak to the ​“transformation” of Mandy Management from 15 years ago to today. Same goes for Public Works. ​“Our relationship is great with them.”

In a recent phone interview with the Independent, Candice Jones, who has rented from Mandy Management on Sherman Avenue since the company bought her apartment complex in 2020, said she still feels that Mandy is just too big.

Yes, they do answer the phone when she calls for maintenance. And ​“they will eventually fix” whatever the problem is. 

Her problem with their bigness is that she wants their help relocating to a different apartment. ​“I asked to move to a different location because I didn’t feel safe where I was,” she said about Sherman Avenue. There’s too much ​“gang-related stuff” in the area she lives in now, including a recent shooting near her apartment complex.

“They told me I can find another landlord,” she said. If that’s the case, she said, then she feels stuck. Because Mandy owns so many apartments in the city, she fears she won’t be able to find somewhere new she can afford owned by a landlord she can work with.

Asked if she’s noticed any significant change in how Mandy Management operates as a landlord in her three years of renting from them, Jones, who recently herself became a real estate agent, said, ​“To me, it’s the same.”

A tenant named Seth who has lived in a Mandy apartment complex on Edgewood Avenue for one month, meanwhile, was much more enthusiastic about his landlord when this reporter spoke with him as he was running from his apartment to catch the bus on Friday.

“I love them,” he said about Mandy. ​“The service is good. Any time you need them, you call.” The payment plan is ​“flexible,” he said. 

Seth said he is a business student at the University of New Haven, newly arrived to New Haven just a month ago from his home country of Ghana. He said a close friend of his who has lived in New Haven for longer recommended he rent from Mandy. He said he’s happy with them so far.

In response to a separate request for comment on Thursday, tenants union organizer Luke Melonakos-Harrison — who has helped organize renters and raise safety and housing-condition concerns at local apartment complexes owned by a different megalandlord, Ocean Management — declined to comment for this story.

To read interviews with other Mandy tenants over the years on a range of topics, from property maintenance to evictions to Mandy’s expansion, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Eviction Approach: "#1 Goal Is To Work It Out"

And what about evictions? Mandy Management files more eviction lawsuits than any other landlord in town. Last year, Mandy filed 261 eviction cases against New Haven tenants.

Gurevitch pointed out that, since the start of 2023, his company has filed more than 300 eviction cases against its New Haven-area renters. ​“But only 26 of those cases actually went to an eviction” and saw the tenant removed from their home at the order of the court. ​“I would say that’s a pretty good number.”

“The reason for that,” he continued, ​“is that our number one priority is working with our tenants, working with our residents. We understand that life can get expensive, things that are uncontrollable can happen, and a tenant can fall behind on their rent. We totally get that. And we’re not out there to get anybody out of there home. We understand that there’s a family on the other side of it, and that [an eviction is] the last, last, last resort. We always try to call a tenant, speak to them, try to get an understanding of what is going on and always try to work something out with the tenant.”

That’s why, Gurevitch said, even for the eviction cases that end up in court, ​“most of them, we come to an agreement.”

Why file an eviction in the first place, given that the mere presence of an eviction lawsuit on someone’s record can make it very difficult for them to find a new place to live — regardless of how that case shakes out?

“A lot of times, a tenant, we can’t get a hold of them,” Gurevitch said. ​“A lot of times, we’ll call them, we’ll email them, we’ll even send somebody out to the apartment, but sometimes you just can’t get a hold of them, or a lot of times a tenant will say they’re coming to pay rent, but you give them one chance, you give them two chances, and then you’re like, you have no choice.”

Gurevitch stressed that Mandy’s ​“number one goal is to work it out” with tenants rather than to evict them. 

When does Mandy decide to evict a tenant? If they’re late on one month’s rent? Three month’s rent? Something else?

Gurevitch said his company has an ​“automated system [that] tells us what’s going on” with how far behind on rent a tenant may be. But, ultimately, it’s someone in the office who makes the call as to whether or not an eviction lawsuit should be filed. That decision is made based on how many times Mandy has reached out to the tenant, how much they’re behind on rent, if they’ve already told Mandy once or twice that they’d pay but haven’t followed through, ​“of if we just can’t get a hold of them.”

“It’s a case-by-case situation,” Gurevitch said. But, he stressed, ​“as long as they’re communicating with us, we’ll work with them.”

While Gurevitch did not know off the top of his head what the average rent in a Mandy apartment is, he did say it’s ​“fairly below market.”

“We do that intentionally. We know we can charge a lot more for our apartments. … We’re here to help the community,” he said. ​“We care about people, the people of New Haven. We care about the city, and therefore we invested so much money into the city. We’re not here to jack up the rents and get the max rent. We’re here to have a sustainable company, to help people afford their home, the apartment that they’re renting.” 

When Mandy renews a lease, he said, ​“we’re not there to jack up the rent by 10, 20 percent. We don’t do that. Our average increase is somewhere between 3 and 6 percent.”

“We’re not sharks,” he continued. ​“We’re not only there for the profit. What I love about the job is interacting with all the people. It’s their home. … it’s where they live, where they grow up and live with their family. It means a lot. We understand that. This is why we try to create the best systems that can help out with that.”

New Haven Legal Assistance Association Director Shelley White, who regularly represents low-income tenants facing eviction in housing court — including by Mandy Management — said she still takes umbrage with how many eviction lawsuits Mandy files, even if many of them do end in settlements.

Those lawsuits still create eviction records that can make it very hard for tenants to find a new place to live, regardless of whether or not the tenant was at fault. She said Mandy itself can be quite strict about using a tenant’s past eviction record to block them from moving into a Mandy apartment.

Using eviction court to handle rental disputes can be ​“very expensive” for tenants, she said, especially if a settlement winds up requiring a tenant to pay the landlord’s attorney’s fees. And with Mandy, ​“my concern is: they’re big. They are the source for so many people who are without housing at any given moment. Mandy is going to be the first place that they’re going to call, because they have so much inventory.” If they’re unduly strict about eviction records or lawsuits, then that can make things very hard for lots of low-income New Haven tenants.

With all of that said, White continued, she was encouraged to hear LCI Deputy Stroud’s comments about how Mandy has a 24/7 liaison available for LCI, and that they have not been back in criminal housing court since spring. That’s a ​“low bar” to clear, she said. But one that not every landlord is abiding by. ​“It’s good to know that [housing court fines and prosecution are] creating some kind of a deterrent effect such that landlords need to do the things they need to do to be responsive” to housing code compliance orders.

Money Behind Mandy: "Israeli Funds"

Asked about the money behind Mandy Management’s New Haven operations, Gurevitch said that most of the company’s investors are ​“Israeli funds, hedge funds. I don’t know exactly who is investing.” That’s not his line of the business. ​“I don’t deal with the investors, I deal with the day to day that’s going on on the ground.”

CoreVest American Finance, a California-based commercial lender that has supported Mandy’s local real estate business with tens of millions of dollars in recent years, Gurevitch described as ​“a bank that finances the properties.”

Gurevitch also said that Netz — the parent company for Mandy Management — was previously publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, but no longer is.

Do investors ever tell him how to run Mandy’s New Haven business to, for example, maximize profits at the expense of tenants?

No, Gurevitch said. ​“They come here and see what we do and they’re very impressed. It’s free reins for us. We run a pretty tight ship. They see that this is the best way to operate.”

“Our investors are happy with the returns that we’ve generated over the last 25 years,” he said when asked again about the role of Mandy’s investors in its day-to-day New Haven operations. ​“And we believe that there’s a middle ground of making a profit, but also putting our tenants first. Because that is our priority, putting our tenants first.”

Asked about the role that his father, Menachem, plays in Mandy Management today, given that he founded the business and is still listed as the principal on its LLCs, Gurevitch said that he and his father get along well and that his father is ​“less involved today” than in the past. He lives in Brooklyn. And, because Mandy has properties in other states outside of Connecticut, his father ​“oversees everything. He’s not really involved in the day-to-day operation here.”

“He leaves it up to us,” Gurevitch concluded. ​“He has faith in us that we do a good job. I think that’s based off of what we’ve done over the past 10 years.”