Our History

Verco Properties and its affiliated companies own and manage a portfolio of over 30 properties throughout the Northeast. With over 75 years of experience spanning 4 generations, we have a particular focus on the rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of historic properties. Property restoration is our passion and we purchase old, sometimes abandoned buildings, and repurpose them into homes, stores, restaurants, offices and other mixed-uses. We seek to preserve each property’s historic feel while incorporating modern and green technologies that not only benefit our residents, commercial tenants and our communities, but do our part to protect the environment.

An American Story

Our business started with our family’s grocery store, the Verni’s Market, one block from Gracie Mansion on the corner of York Avenue and 89th Street in the Yorkville section on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Giovanni Verni who came from Bari, Italy in 1919 bought the building for his grocery store in the 1940s and moved his wife and young family to an apartment above the store. The Verni family later acquired other buildings on the Upper East Side and renovated them into apartments for middle class New Yorkers and people coming to New York to start their careers.

Vito Verni, Giovanni’s son, joined the family business after serving America in the U.S. Army. Under Vito’s direction and leadership, the Verni family dramatically expanded their real estate portfolio into other growing areas of Manhattan such as Grammercy Park, the East Village, Chelsea and SoHo before these areas became the trendy neighborhoods they are today. Vito also acquired and redeveloped work force housing in the north Bronx serving the needs of everyday New Yorkers communting into Manhattan.

Today a third and fourth generation of the Verni family continue to serve the needs of residents and store owners throughout the New York metropolitan area. We have also begun to expand into other areas of the Northeast corridor including the suburbs of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and points beyond.

Preserving the Past and Building for the Future

We continue to seek properties we can breathe new life into and return as assets to the community. Whether it is an old train station that becomes a favorite neighborhood restaurant, an old church that is converted to apartments in a historic neighborhood, an old mill that becomes a hip residential community on a lake with a waterfall, or an old movie theater that becomes a mixed-use transit-oriented development to start the revitalization of a downtown, Verco is taking the old and making it new. By respecting these old buildings and repurposing them to modern standards with sensitivity to the environment, we can preserve the character of the neighborhoods we serve while providing for the needs of modern living.

Verco Properties is also building for the future. In certain areas, we are building or acquiring new housing in established neighborhoods. These “boutique residential communities” are at a scale that reflect and respect the towns and villages where they are situated. Both in design and in scale, Verco Properties is building with the latest in “green technologies” to a scale that complements rather than overwhelms the places we make.