Bruce Percelay – The Mount Vernon Company

Good Dirt: Conversations with Leaders in Real Estate & Beyond

Bruce Percelay is chairman and founder of The Mount Vernon Company, a real estate investment firm considered among the leading multifamily investors in Massachusetts. The privately held company has grown over the past 30 years to include a portfolio including thousands of apartments, 5 hotels, and a variety of specialty commercial and vacation properties. Our conversation with Bruce starts in his advertising days, when he helped manage the marketing efforts for Parker Brother's Games, Keds Sneakers, and Converse Athletic Shoes. He is also credited with the development of the idea for Sunkist Orange Soda, the most successful new soft drink launch in the history of the industry. This is also when Bruce made his first real estate play, a $28,000 condo on the “wrong side of Beacon Hill” which he improved on nights and weekends and subsequently flipped, doubling his investment. Bruce admittedly never looked back and reinvested his proceeds into additional properties, using his marketing savvy (pioneering the concept of “staging”, with a best-selling book to prove it) combined with an eye for neighborhood demographics to amass one of the most impressive privately held apartment portfolios in the region. The discussion then gets even more interesting as we learn about the transformative development of Allston’s Green District and then delve into Bruce’s hospitality portfolio, which includes several acclaimed boutique hotels on Nantucket and the visionary Revolution Hotel in Boston’s South End, in addition to others in Newport RI, Portsmouth NH and coastal Maine. We continue the Nantucket thread to discuss perhaps Bruce’s most interesting asset- N Magazine and its digital affiliates, the island’s luxury lifestyle publication with a print circulation over 90,000 and online audience of over 500,000. Finally, we get into Bruce’s philanthropic endeavors, leading the charge to build replacement facilities for both the Nantucket Whaling Museum and Nantucket Cottage Hospital, chairing the board of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate, and much more. From mixed-use projects in Portsmouth to high-end residential in Palm Beach, Bruce is as multidimensional as he is savvy, and it is a true pleasure to consider him a friend and client. There’s certainly only one Bruce Percelay and we think you’ll enjoy this look behind the curtain!

For more information on The Mount Vernon Company visit www.mvernon.com and be sure to visit 21 Broad & 76 Main when on Nantucket!

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Mike Greeley

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Tom Greeley

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