VCU just bought a sizable downtown parking deck from a Richmonder who knows the university well. Earlier this month the university paid for $7.2 million for the six-level garage at 1410 E. Cary St. The seller in the deal was Jim Farinholt, a former investment banker who developed the deck in the 1980s. That was around the time that Farinholt started a nine-year stint on VCU’s Board of Visitors. In an interview last week, Farinholt said he was on the board when VCU built the Bio+Tech Park and hired Eugene Trani, the university president who preceded current president Michael Rao. With around 890 spaces, the deck is one of the largest stand-alone parking decks in the city. Over the years, Farinholt has leased out blocks of spaces to nearby businesses, but lately it’s been mostly public parking. A spokesperson for VCU said the university pursued the property because it wanted to reduce its dependence on third-party parking leases and move employees and students from a surface lot to a garage with better security, lighting and technology. VCU said final decisions have not yet been made about which parking lot leases it’s planning to terminate. Farinholt said that in the ’80s he was approached by some private investors who were interested in building a deck at 14th and Cary. When he and the investors couldn’t get the project to pencil out in his capacity as a banker at Wheat First Securities, a firm that would later be absorbed by Wachovia and Wells Fargo, Farinholt set out to build the deck himself. In order to get the deck financed, Farinholt said he needed to raise a certain amount of equity and secure parking commitments. “I went around to all the local businesses in the region of downtown Richmond,” Farinholt said. “Long story short, I got, I think it was, 760 parking space commitments.” He bought the land for $1.4 million in 1983 and a year later built the deck. He said he paid it off in five years, and that “everybody was happy,” until the early 1990s, when the City of Richmond built a five-story parking deck at 901 E. Canal St. and offered monthly rates that were about 70 percent cheaper than what he was charging. “Needless to say, they sucked out about 420 of my parkers. Parkers don’t have loyalty, they just need a space to park,” Farinholt said. “I sucked wind to the tune of about a $300,000 loss per year for about a year and a half, until I found a management company that could help me round up parkers.” Then came the pandemic and its impacts on downtown Richmond. Farinholt said after spending the last few years trying to get the deck back on track, he decided he didn’t want to have to worry about any more future ups and downs, so he put in a call to Rao. “I’m 90 years old, and I’m not going to go through this again. This is too tough. I couldn’t handle another COVID or a whatever-have-you impact. That’s why I called Michael,” he said. “I just said, ‘Are you interested in my parking deck?’ And (Rao) said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve got one on the long-term schedule for construction, and nobody knows where in the hell we’re going to find the land, aside from the fact that it’ll cost somewhere (around) $15 million dollars,’” Farinholt recalls. Farinholt said he proposed a deal wherein he’d sell the deck to VCU for below its market value and qualify the difference as a donation to the university. “So (Rao) said, ‘We are on.’ And the rest is history,” Farinholt said. The sale closed on May 16 for $7.2 million, $2 million below the deck’s most recent city-assessed value of $9.2 million. In total, VCU acquired about 1.25 acres of land, including a triangular, 0.1-acre plot at 25 S. 14th St. The deal comes out to around $8,000 per parking space. The deal is at least the second VCU has made in the city this year. It’s Real Estate Foundation in January purchased the Rite Aid property at the corner of Broad and Belvidere for nearly $5 million. And VCU Health recently spread its wealth elsewhere in the region, when it spent $1.5 million for a 9-acre site in Chesterfield County. It’s planning a 100,000-square-foot medical office building on that property .
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