Cleveland Plain Dealer “Awards stacking up for Safeguard owner”
Cleveland Plain Dealer profiled?recent honors bestowed on?Safeguard Properties founder and CEO Robert Klein including being named the national winner of the Ernst & Young LLP Entrepreneur Of The Year 2009 Award in the Servicing category.
Awards stacking up for Safeguard owner
Funny man Jay Leno hosted that awards ceremony a week ago in swank Palm Springs, Calif. But Klein – who owns Safeguard Properties – couldn’t make it.
The Valley View self-starter already had plans to accept another award in equally plush Key Largo, Fla., this one from the U.S. Foreclosure Network (also called America’s Mortgage Banking Attorneys).
It’s been a year of accolades and big profits for Klein, who launched Safeguard in 1990 as a two-person operation. Now it’s the largest privately held mortgage field services company in the United States.
Safeguard – which has nearly 800 employees and thousands of contractors – inspects about 1 million defaulted properties each month and puts in about 250,000 work orders on vacant properties across the country, doing everything from mowing lawns to replacing windows.
Klein, 56, revealed no bravado when asked about the 2009 awards, which also included the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Northeast Ohio region and a humanitarian award from the Five Star Default Servicing Conference in Fort Worth, Texas.
Rather, he thanked his staff.
“They work very hard. They’re the ones who deserve it,” Klein said.
Klein is a self-made man who started his career at 16 with a loan from his father to buy a taxicab in New York City. Later, after selling the cab license for more than 10 times what he’d paid, he moved to Cleveland and took over a relative’s produce business at Cleveland’s Northern Ohio Food Terminal.
Safeguard Properties was born in 1990 after Klein learned that a local company that serviced vacant homes was going out of business.
His company now generates about $500 million in annual revenue, bolstered in part by the foreclosure crisis and recession.
Not all of Klein’s awards are for his business savvy. Some organizations have honored Klein for supporting initiatives in Cleveland to help ease the impact of the foreclosure crisis on the local community.
He’s given nearly $200,000 to the Cuyahoga County Foreclosure Prevention Program, which has helped thousands of owners avoid losing their homes.
When asked what all the rewards mean for Safeguard Properties’ future, Klein chuckled and said his response would be the same one he gives friends who ask.
“When I had the reward, I went to the local bank and said, ‘Hey, I got this award, what’s it worth?’ ” Klein said. “They said about $15.”??
To view the online article, please click here. ?About Safeguard
Safeguard Properties is the largest privately held field services company in the country. Located in Cleveland, Ohio and founded in 1990 by Robert Klein, Safeguard has grown from a regional preservation company with a few employees and a handful of contractors performing services in the Midwest, to a national company with over 700 employees. Safeguard is supported by a nationwide network of subcontractors able to perform any requested superintendence, preservation, and maintenance functions, as well as numerous ancillary services in the U.S., the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.
