Washington Nationals owner Ted Lerner and manager Dave Martinez celebrate at the World Series.
Elsa/Getty Images)
The Washington Nationals historic World Series victory is the culmination of a decades-long dream for Ted Lerner, the billionaire patriarch of the family that owns the baseball team.
The Nationals defeated the Houston Astros 6-2 Wednesday night in the series’ must-win Game 7. The underdogs lost three games at home before winning Games 6 and 7 on the road. The nation’s capital has not seen a baseball title since the Senators won in 1924.
The Lerners have owned the team since 2006, when Major League Baseball selected the real estate developers out of eight bidders in a long battle for the team that resulted in a sale for $450 million.
“Owning a baseball team in my hometown had long been a dream of mine,” said Ted Lerner in June 2018 when he announced his son Mark would be taking his place as managing principal owner. He added: “I look forward to watching him take the helm and help lead this team to a world championship.”
Mark is also a principal at Lerner Enterprises. Lerner’s sons-in-law are executives in the family business and his daughter Marla runs the family foundation.
The elder Lerner turned 94 during the playoffs. He is the richest person in Maryland, with an estimated $5.3 billion net worth, including a 70% stake in the Nationals and a share of regional sports network MASN. In April Forbes pegged the value of the Nationals at $1.8 billion, but there is a good chance that number will increase following the championship.
The bulk of the family’s fortune and its origin, however, is real estate.
Ted attended law school at George Washington University on the GI Bill, selling real estate on weekends to support his widowed mother and younger siblings. After realizing law was not his calling, Lerner borrowed $250 from his wife, Annette, and in 1952 began selling homes for a local home builder.
“Since it was early November, I wrapped an entire model home in Christmas decorations. I took out an ad in the paper, with his money. I put Santa Clauses on each of the ten corners in the development. I pulled out all the stops,” recalled Lerner in an essay for Forbes in 2013. That ad ran on a Friday, and by noon Saturday, he recalled, all 25 homes had sold for $14,990 apiece.
A few years later he decided to try his hand at development, starting with Wheaton Plaza, one of the first shopping malls in the D.C. area. The Lerners are now among the largest owners of real estate in the region, including its largest mall, Tysons Corner Center, and several downtown office buildings.
“By the late 1980s, one could assume that every adult in Washington had probably lived, worked, or shopped in a building developed by Ted Lerner,” declared Washingtonian magazine in 2003.