New York, NY – City Billionaire, Ignoring Recession, Shops for Bargains

New York, NY – One of New York City’s wealthiest residents, shrugging off the deepening recession, has been on a real estate buying spree – buying up parcels across the country at depressed prices.

Len Blavatnik, a Russia-born oil tycoon-turned-New York billionaire, and companies he controls have snapped up multi-million dollar houses and parcels of land in Florida, Nevada, California and Texas, apparently hoping to turn a pretty profit once the real estate market turns around.

Blavatnik, the founder and president of Access Industries, a conglomerate of industrial, chemical, real estate and media properties, already owns three trophy Manhattan properties, including a $27 million Fifth Avenue condo.

The 51-year old tycoon, who declined to comment on his purchases, broke Big Apple real estate records in 2007 when he bought a townhouse on East 64th Street near Fifth Avenue for $50 million from Warner Music boss Edgar Bronfman.

In that same year, the naturalized US citizen was part of a consortium that bought a $625 million tract of land in Las Vegas just down the street form the Planet Hollywood Hotel, records show.

Blavatnik, who also owns a $31 million East Side residence, on 63rd Street, has spent more time in the past two years looking for cheap, some would say odd, deals in California and Florida as the foreclosure crisis has forced prices into the bargain basement.

For example, in Los Angeles county, Access teamed up with a small mortgage firm, called Anchor, to buy numerous properties out of foreclosure, including a $150,000 ranch in Compton and other modest homes in less desirable areas of Oakland.

In Texas, meanwhile, Blavatnik-related entities have bought millions of dollars worth of agricultural land.

Blavatnik’s real estate buying spree appears to have petered out at the end of 2008, however, as the billionaire – a prominent philanthropist who gives millions to countless Jewish charities all over the world – ran into trouble. Last month Blavatnik’s Lyondell Basell, a large chemical company, was forced to file for bankruptcy.

While he is the sixth-wealthiest New Yorker, worth about $7.2 billion according to Forbes, Blavatnik has managed to fly largely under the media radar screen. A man of very few words with a deadpan sense of humor, Blavatnik is said to be a fan of the Eddie Murphy comedy, “Trading Places.”

At a company conference in 2005, quoting a line from the 1983 film, Blavatnik told senior executives: “Basically the idea is we buy low and sell high, we are here to make money,” a former employee said.
“To him this was a great joke,” the ex-employee said. “The people in the room did not get it, but that makes it even funnier for Len.”

Blavatnik considers himself an American, despite having been born in Ukraine. He came to New York in 1978 at the age of 21 and earned a degree in computing at Columbia and then an MBA from Harvard.

He is often referred to an “oligarch” but bristles at the name, insisting he is not one of them, despite having made his early fortune in the Russian oil business.

“He is very different from the oligarchs,” the former employee said. “He does not like to be seen or to be heard and he has the ability to make everyone who works for him feel like they are doing something very important.”