Alaska’s Hidden Billionaire

Just south of the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in Anchorage, Alaska, there’s a seven-block mobile home park named Four Seasons, where rentals start at $1,300 a month.

It’s one of at least 40 multifamily properties in the area, or about 12 percent of the city’s entire rental market, owned by Weidner Investment Services Inc.

“They’re the 800-pound gorilla in town,” Kim Johnson, a real estate agent with Paragon Properties Inc., said in a phone interview.

The 4,000 apartments are a fraction of the more than 38,000 units the company owns in Seattle, Phoenix, Colorado, Texas, Canada’s Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces, and other markets. Together, the properties have a net asset value of $2.3 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, making the company’s 72-year-old founder W. Dean Weidner a billionaire.

Weidner’s mother began teaching him how to maintain and manage his family’s duplex and fourplex apartments in Colorado Springs when he was 14 years old, according to a 2002 profile in Alaska Business Monthly. He continued to manage them through college, according to the article.

He bought his first property in Seattle in 1977, Weidner said in an October 2013 talk at University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he donated $1 million to the business school. At the time, he was an assistant vice president at Alaska Airlines Inc., according to his LinkedIn page.

Via bloomberg.com

image credit Josh Edge APRN

Related Story