Developer Polimeni finds paradise in Poland

Mineola developer and cross-Sound tunnel visionary Vincent Polimeni has been to Hel and back, and he's never sounded more alive.

Polimeni's Poland operation -- now a 40-person team -- is expanding from retail to residential projects, and its first stop is a beautiful waterfront paradise, the city of Hel, on the Hel peninsula. The site is what Polimeni calls "the Hamptons of Poland."

"It's where everyone wants to be," he said.

That doesn't mean he's pulling back on cross-pond retail. His company, Polimeni International, has 15 sites in contract across Poland that will house about 500 million square feet of new retail space.

"The country's on fire," Polimeni reported fresh off the plane yesterday. He said the zloty, the Polish currency, is now worth 50 cents (U.S.), up from about 23 cents a decade ago, when he started working in the region. Polimeni says dealing in European currencies is helping him bring in 50 percent more revenue over comparable work he could do stateside, and European Union money is flowing in to Poland, supporting new infrastructure and a growing consumer class.

Mineola developer and cross-Sound tunnel visionary Vincent Polimeni has been to Hel and back, and he's never sounded more alive.

Polimeni's Poland operation -- now a 40-person team -- is expanding from retail to residential projects, and its first stop is a beautiful waterfront paradise, the city of Hel, on the Hel peninsula. The site is what Polimeni calls "the Hamptons of Poland."

"It's where everyone wants to be," he said.

That doesn't mean he's pulling back on cross-pond retail. His company, Polimeni International, has 15 sites in contract across Poland that will house about 500 million square feet of new retail space.

"The country's on fire," Polimeni reported fresh off the plane yesterday. He said the zloty, the Polish currency, is now worth 50 cents (U.S.), up from about 23 cents a decade ago, when he started working in the region. Polimeni says dealing in European currencies is helping him bring in 50 percent more revenue over comparable work he could do stateside, and European Union money is flowing in to Poland, supporting new infrastructure and a growing consumer class.

"It's almost the reverse of what's happening here," he says. "The economy is growingin leaps and bounds, where here we're looking at a potential disaster."

Expanding into Poland remains the best decision Polimeni made, he says, though he didn't know it at first. A recent Romanian misadventure underscores just how well-timed his entry into the Polish market was: Polimeni says he "wasted six months and lots of money" last year to find out that Romania is too far along in its economic development to offer the same kinds of bargains he found in Poland.

"The prices of land are insane, because they all think they have gold," he says.

In Poland, meanwhile, the biggest problem is construction costs. There are labor and material shortages, and projects now cost about double what they did 10 years ago. But that barrier isn't high enough to slow him down.

"Everybody has money, everybody wants everything we have, and I'm doing my best to give it to them," Polimeni says.