Multifamily syndication is an unlikely corner of real estate for a guy like Jon Venetos.
Investors who adopted the pooled-equity model of multifamily acquisition have a reputation. They’re snake-oil salesmen for passive income, spreading the gospel of the value-add proposition to lawyers and doctors on LinkedIn: Give us money, and we’ll buy old apartments, fix them up, raise the rents, sell the properties and get you an easy profit.
Many syndicators got into the game when they were young and inexperienced. Take Sean Kia, who co-founded Tides Equities in 2016 at the age of 25. His work spawned headlines like Entrepreneur’s “This 31-Year-Old Investor Nearly Quadrupled His Multifamily Housing Empire From California to Texas in Just 3 Years.”
Within nine months of that story, Kia and his partner Ryan Andrade were begging investors for more cash. The foreclosures ramped up in 2024 as Tides’ shabby apartment assets deteriorated. Then, lenders started pursuing the pair down for the loans they personally guaranteed.
The unraveling of Tides was the canary in the coal mine for aggressive multifamily investors and syndicators. The wave of distress then buffeted Alan Stalcup’s GVA and Jay Gajavelli’s Applesway Investment Group.
Venetoses opened Lurin Capital the same year as Tides. The value proposition was similar, but the guy in charge seemed different.
Venetos and his wife, Ashley, came up at prestigious banks and hedge funds. After launching at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, Jon joined Citadel in 2006, rising to head of one of the fund’s stock-picking units, Surveyor Capital. Ashley did investor relations at Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square.
The pair enjoyed the fruits of their finance paychecks, buying two penthouses in a five-story building at 87 Mercer Street in Soho. They combined the units and tapped Tony Ingrao to remodel them into a luxurious 6,700-square-foot pad, complete with a multi-level rooftop whose hot tub installation required a crane. They again hired Ingrao to design a shingled Hamptons mansion for the 2.3-acre tract they bought in Sagaponack in 2013.
But in 2016, a purge at Surveyor — whose primary funds tumbled at the beginning of the year — included Jon. He took a sharp turn, listing the penthouse, selling the 12,000-square-foot Hamptons estate for $15.8 million, moving to Dallas and pivoting to real estate.
“I saw a really inefficient market in real estate, specifically in the multifamily space,” Venetos said on the Real Crowd Podcast in October 2022, the only time he’s spoken publicly.
He thought he could professionalize the niche, introducing best practices from the big dogs on his résumé. “There was a significant amount of what we could define in the fundamental equity business as ‘alpha,’” he said.
This thesis formed the basis of his multifamily portfolio, which peaked at 10,000 apartment units in 19 markets across five states.
Plus, he had a family advantage: The Venetoses had been investing in apartments in Chicago for decades, he said.
But neither pedigree nor legacy were enough to save him, and it was just a matter of time before he met the same fate as his contemporaries. In the fall of 2025 came a crush of foreclosures, default lawsuits and receivership appointments. In the hunt for money still owed to lenders and limited partners, suggestions of fraudulent dealings surfaced.
Lenders were suing on a near-daily basis by early December. Lurin Capital’s mounting legal trouble started to hint of more than mismanagement or bad timing: One lawsuit accused Venetos of falsifying documents to lenders; another accused him of pocketing loan proceeds while in default. That’s when former employees started coming out of the woodwork with claims that fraud was part of Lurin’s operation — not just a symptom of distress.
That fits with trends loan servicers have tracked, according to Trimont’s Rob Walton. Fraud is prevalent in Class C Texas multifamily “in a way I didn’t ever expect to see,” he said at a multifamily conference in Dallas in August.
It is unclear where the Venetos are; the family moved to an Aspen mansion for a while this fall before lenders sued to foreclose on that property too. Venetos did not agree to be interviewed for the story or comment on the claims. Lurin and Venetos have denied claims made in lawsuits by their lenders.
Down to Dallas
The Venetoses swapped their posh New York life for the large-format stateliness of Dallas’ well-heeled.
Jon and Ashley moved to Highland Park, the neighborhood where Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones lives.
They bought the Italianate Craftsman at 4001 Miramar Avenue in 2021, a few months after the nearly 6,000-square-foot tan brick home got a glowing profile in local real estate blog Candy’s Dirt. Built in 1920 for a Waco cotton merchant, it’s framed by mature trees that shade the backyard and pool on an almost half-acre lot.
The mansion is also a block from the Dallas Country Club, and Ashley embraced the role of Highland Park wife, making multiple appearances in the Lone Star State’s society rag, Paper City.
“Just give me my damn K1 and I can write this off.”
In October 2024, she was photographed at the grand finale of Two x Two for AIDS and Art Gala, a storied Dallas fete that has drawn celebs like Alan Cumming, Natasha Richardson and Sigourney Weaver during its two-decade run. She cut a chic figure in a white skirt and cropped short-sleeve jacket, bracelets piled past her wrist; guests drank Dom Perignon and ate a four-course meal that included Regiis Ova ossetra caviar, per Culture Map.
Meanwhile, Jon wasted no time building his multifamily empire.
Lurin launched four funds between June 2016 and January 2017, Securities and Exchange filings show. The first fund didn’t have a capped offering, but the second fund offered $3 million and sold $2.98 million. The third offered $7 million and sold $6.95 million. The fourth fund sold $4.8 million of its $5 million offering. The minimum investment in the Lurin funds ranged from $5,000 to $10,000.
In December 2018, he signed an office lease at Rosewood Court at 2101 Cedar Springs Road, a prestigious office address in Uptown, across the street from the Crescent, the mixed-use development that anchors the sought-after neighborhood.
From 2016 on, he bought a few apartment complexes in the Sun Belt each year. Purchasing ramped up in 2021 and 2022. The priciest was The Delmar, a 689-unit waterfront apartment building in Tampa that he picked up for $132.8 million in 2022. The acquisition seemed to announce that Lurin had moved into a bigger sandbox, capable of managing assets that were bigger and more centrally located than prior purchases, like The Beacon, a 223-unit complex in Huntsville, Alabama, which Lurin snapped up for $15.8 million in 2021.
The local business world took notice. Lurin Capital came in seventh on the annual list of fastest-growing small private companies in North Texas conducted by Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. The list is based on percentage growth and absolute dollar growth.
The Venetos playbook
Like fellow syndicators, Venetos focused on buying rental properties built after 1970 in high-growth markets. Unlike his peers, the cornerstone of the Venetos approach was rate caps.
When syndicators were sweeping through Texas and picking up apartment complexes, interest rates were low. Some syndicators seemed to think they’d always be. But this wasn’t Venetos’ first rodeo. He sensed rates would come back up again, and he paid to protect himself from that inevitability.
Documents provided by a former employee show that Lurin spent between 0.54 and 0.59 percent of the loan value on rate caps for three properties the firm purchased in Alabama in April 2021. The cost of rate caps quickly shot up when rates started increasing: Lurin bought a rate cap that cost more than 2.3 percent of the loan tied to a fourth Alabama property purchased in June 2022. The four caps in question cost between $76,000 and $406,000, including a $6,000 rate cap broker fee for each. They were attached to loans whose values ranged from $12.8 million to $21.8 million.
“We have a deal where we paid sub $300,000 for interest rate cap. Today that’s worth $4 million,” he said in the 2022 podcast interview.
Venetos’ playbook also involved reducing exposure to external cost drivers like inflation by keeping things in the family. The Lurin Capital umbrella includes Lurin’s in-house property management company Steward + Helm (which rebranded in 2024), Lurin Construction Services, Lurin Construction Management and Integrated Solutions and Integrated Renovations, two Lurin-owned companies that perform repairs, like roofing and unit upgrades.
Venetos doesn’t come off as braggadocious in the one-hour episode, but he gives the impression of an outsider who knows he’s the expert.
He was “super surprised to hear” that data-driven decision-making “was an exception rather than a rule” in real estate, he said to the host. Government didn’t have the answers. “I think the Fed will overshoot and cause a deeper recession,” he said.
Crash out
The rapid interest rate hikes starting in 2022 proved a fatal blow for multifamily syndicators who took out floating rate debt and didn’t have rate caps.
Debt service payments ballooned. Construction costs soared. Outfits like Tides Equities and GVA effectively lost everything.
Venetos held on longer, thanks to the rate cap play.
But three years later, problems hit in quick succession.
In April, lender Acore Capital Mortgage said Lurin defaulted on $384 million in loans tied to 12 properties in the Florida panhandle. The lender started auctioning off those properties in the spring and went after Venetos for what was left, claiming he’d personally guaranteed the loans and still owed $81 million.
By fall, Lurin’s lenders were in various stages of wresting control of Lurin properties and trying to get Venetos to pay what he still owed. Fannie Mae sued Venetos in November for defaulting on a $77.2 million loan tied to a Houston apartment complex and asked the court to appoint a receiver, claiming the conditions “present immediate danger to tenants.” Keybank did the same, claiming in a lawsuit that Lurin defaulted on $24 million in loans tied to two Dallas properties. In its lawsuit, Vista Bank alleged that he still owed $3 million after the lender took back a Lurin property at a foreclosure sale. A lender from Luxembourg, Select Securities Europe, sued Lurin, claiming it defaulted on 15 loans totaling $40.5 million.
All told, at least five lenders accused Lurin of defaulting on $710 million in loans tied to Sun Belt properties.
A December lawsuit from Lurin’s office landlord lays out a similar timeline.
Lurin missed a rent payment in October 2024 but caught up after two notices of default in November, landlord Rosewood Property Company wrote in a lawsuit. Lurin’s last rent payment was made in May 2025. Rosewood terminated the lease in October and ordered the company to vacate, which it did in November.
By the end of six months, more than half of Lurin’s holdings were in foreclosure proceedings or had already been handed back to lenders.
Lurin’s remaining properties are mostly in receivership or foreclosure proceedings. Local municipalities have gotten involved after complaints about the decrepit state of the complexes.
A Collin County judge on Oct. 27 issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of the city of Plano against Lurin and ordered residents of Evana Grove Apartments, an apartment complex there, to evacuate, deeming the property “uninhabitable.”
The property had racked up nearly 1,500 code violations. At the time the order was issued, residents did not have access to water, sewer or gas at the apartment complex. City official Curtis Howard called it “the worst apartment complex we have in the city of Plano.”
This reality was starkly different from Venetos’s take in 2022, when he critiqued the real estate world for not valuing human capital.
“The people who operate your property, the people who support your properties, the people who reside in your property, the community, are all paramount to your success of that asset,” he said in the same podcast interview.
Now, it’s the same groups — investors, tenants and employees — suffering most from his collapse.
“I have accepted that we as investors are totally screwed, there won’t be any scraps after the banks and attorneys get whatever is left. Just give me my damn K1 and I can write this off,” one Reddit user wrote on a thread about Lurin.
Dispatches from current and former residents of former Lurin properties paint a grisly picture of what can happen when value-add multifamily investors have financial trouble.
Alondra Mendoza has lived at Estancia Estates, an apartment complex at 2222 Graycliff Drive in Dallas, for 15 years. The place was recently taken over by Dallas-based Indio Management, but during Lurin’s tenure, work orders went unanswered.
“My dad would fix everything at home,” she said. When the building had a plumbing issue, Mendoza’s family and her upstairs neighbor forked over $1,000 each to fix it, since Lurin wouldn’t, she claimed.
Regina Carruth, a resident of the Declan, at 1615 John West Road in Dallas, under Lurin’s ownership, said the property fell into such disarray that “squatters were coming in, kicking into empty apartments and staying in there.” Her air conditioning didn’t work for two months during the summer of 2023, the third-hottest summer in Dallas-Fort Worth on record.
“It was just horrible,” she said.
Things got worse when Lurin stopped paying vendors altogether. Trash was an issue. At Estancia Estates, Mendoza said the dumpster was overflowing to the extent that “the trash took up half of the street.”
Inner workings
One investor surmised that Lurin didn’t repurchase rate caps after they expired in 2023 and 2024, “which made many of their properties [go] to a 3-4x higher rate, making things go to sh*t and belly up,” per a Reddit post.
But lender lawsuits provide a first glimpse of something worse.
Keybank alleged Venetos transferred $24,570 from his accounts with the bank to a personal account. Vista accused him of falsifying account statements from the lender in an attempt to take out loans elsewhere.
Employees say the fraud went deeper.
A former employee who worked in property management and asked to remain anonymous claimed Lurin lied on reimbursement requests to lenders by inflating costs of repairs and submitting invoices for work that wasn’t done. That meant Venetos could access new tranches of money before he’d reached the thresholds in his renovations when they were supposed to be disbursed.
In an email sent after an inspection of The Sutton in Alabama, a lender rep picked up on the problem. “None of the units inspected are 100% complete as requested in the draw,” he wrote. “The roofing line item is 97% drawn with no work completed or materials on site.”
“Uninhabitable.”
The lender also points out dramatic inconsistencies between the value of repairs and what was invoiced to complete the work: “For example the parking lot on the LURIN pay app is valued at ~52K and is 100% drawn while the Integrated Solutions deposit invoice values parking lot work at $210K” — meaning Lurin budgeted $52,000 for the repair on an application and certification document, but submitted an invoice to its lender for $210,000. Integrated Solutions is Lurin’s in-house renovations company.
“The LURIN schedule of values need to line up with the contracts you have in place,” the lender wrote.
Real estate owners often create their own property management and construction companies to do the work at properties they own — in that, Lurin wasn’t unusual.
At best, the coziness of these entities simply means they’re fully integrated. But at worse, it means that operators can move money from an operating firm to a property management firm with little oversight.
Venetos didn’t just mislead lenders, employees claim.
Two former employees said Lurin stopped being eligible to offer a 401(k) plan to employees this fall but never informed employees. They provided documentation that shows their 401(k) contributions were withdrawn from their paychecks in November but not deposited into their Fidelity-managed 401(k) accounts.
Conundrum Valley
When things started going south, the Venetoses went north and west — to Aspen.
The family moved to a 4,882-square-foot manse, at 82 Winding Way Road, which they bought in April 2022. It’s billed as a “luxury estate compound in the Conundrum Valley,” an apt location for the Dallas refugees. The blocky home, covered in reclaimed vintage barnwood, looks more like an angular office building. They bought the house and an adjacent 7.6 acres for $18 million.
In a Dec. 22 response to the lawsuit brought by Keybank, Venetos confirmed he and Ashley are living in Colorado, but little has emerged about what they are doing there.
The house’s lender foreclosed in December, and it’s not clear where the Venetoses are living now. A recent legal document identified a Venetos-backed LLC as having an address at 625 East Main Street, Suite 102, in Aspen.
The couple also finally sold their Soho penthouse — the traditional way, though below asking. The new buyer paid $17.4 million, less than a quarter of the $81 million judgment Acore is seeking. The penthouse was first listed in 2017, long before the Lurin collapse, for $29.9 million.
Meanwhile, Lurin is fighting the default lawsuits on its remaining properties. The firm denies allegations made by Fannie Mae, claiming the lender interfered in the management of the property and forced Lurin to miss a loan payment “which created a domino effect from which Lurin could not possibly recover.”
Lurin has hung onto a few properties, like Valley Estates, at 929 Saint Paul Drive in Richardson, outside Dallas. Indio was tapped to manage two DFW properties currently in receivership, including Estancia Estates, where Mendoza lives.
On a December morning, reps from Indio were putting up Christmas decorations in the leasing office, and a team of men were working all over the property. Most of the doors and windows had been boarded up with plywood.
“It looks promising,” Mendoza said of the repairs.
Venetos’ victims up the chain are looking for answers too. They’re also looking for Venetos, in Aspen “or wherever else he may be found,” as Rosewood put it in their December lawsuit against him.
