An international real estate investment company with dozens of properties in Cincinnati “abandoned” its holdings late last year, court filings allege, potentially leaving hundreds of Cincinnati tenants and local investors in limbo.
The city of Cincinnati filed in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas Jan. 3 seeking receivership for more than 630 units of housing strewn across more than 70 multi- and single-family properties owned by real estate investment trust Vision & Beyond.
The city wrote in its filing that the company left hundreds of renters without someone to call for help if something went wrong with their units “through termination of all management and abandonment of the properties under its ownership and/or control.”
Not the only legal challenge
Meanwhile, there are several separate lawsuits against Vision & Beyond in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.
Some are from creditors seeking foreclosure on mortgages taken out on numerous Vision & Beyond properties. One of those suits has resulted in a temporary property manager, called a receiver, at about 25 Vision & Beyond properties.
Other suits allege the company used a complex investment scheme involving those mortgages to defraud investors and misrepresented ownership of its properties.
WVXU has reached out to the city and Vision & Beyond for comment. The city had not responded at the time this article was published.
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WVXU contacted an attorney representing Vision & Beyond, who said he would check to see if the company wished to make any comment about its legal issues. Phone numbers associated with Vision & Beyond’s office and a number posted for a property manager at one of the company’s properties were both disconnected.
WVXU also reached out to the company via email and visited the Mount Auburn address listed as its office. The door to the office was locked, and no one responded to knocks. A notice from Hamilton County sheriffs regarding one of the lawsuits against Vision & Beyond was on the door.
‘A lot of confusion’
Ron Carter, 72, has lived in a property owned by Vision & Beyond next door to its offices since 2021.
He pointed up to the front of the building, which was missing numerous pieces of siding, and said he wasn’t impressed with the maintenance his small, six-unit apartment building received. He claimed he often ended up doing a lot of needed work himself when the company didn’t send anyone to make repairs.
“They’d say, ‘We have a maintenance crew who can do that,’ but they’d never get it done,” he said.
Carter found out Vision & Beyond was no longer in control of the building when he went to pay his November rent and was told to make it out to a different company.
“They tried to get into the housing business, but I don’t think they understood the housing business,” he said of Vision & Beyond. “I don’t think they understood what it took to maintain.”
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Legal Aid of Greater Cincinnati Attorney Nick DiNardo says while temporary management companies are working at some buildings and Vision & Beyond has promised to provide a new, fill-in property manager at others, the situation is a precarious one.
“A lot of the tenants don’t even know where to pay their rent,” DiNardo said. “There’s been a lot of confusion. There are certain buildings out there that seem to have little or no management at all right now. If there’s an emergency situation like no heat or a water leak or something like that, for a lot of these buildings, the tenants either don’t know who to contact or there is no one to contact.”
DiNardo says that’s already happened at least a couple times.
“We’ve gotten calls from a few folks whose heat went out,” he says. “Those tenants were part of the foreclosure receivership case, so the receiver did come out and fix the heat, but we found out there’s a lot of confusion about who’s in charge and who tenants should talk to about issues they’re having.”
The city’s filing against Vision & Beyond contains a litany of code violations against properties it owns. Many are minor, but others deal with pest and rodent infestations, water damage, and heat and plumbing failures.
When contacted by the city about tenant complaints in late December, the property manager for one apartment complex in Westwood said he longer worked there because Vision & Beyond was “broke,” the city’s filing states.
“As of January 2, the property… is without management, garbage collection, or adequate heat in one building,” city attorneys wrote in the filing.
Previous controversy
Stanislav “Stas” Grinberg and Peter Gizunterman founded Vision & Beyond in Cincinnati in 2018, previous news releases from the company say. The idea behind the business: that middle American cities like Cincinnati would see spikes in housing demand as people moved away from expensive coastal areas.
The investment firm is somewhat novel in that it is vertically integrated, with separate subsidiaries dedicated to renovation/construction, property management and building material procurement. A fourth subsidiary called Vision & Beyond Israel based in Tel Aviv is responsible for attracting investors.
Vision & Beyond invested millions in Cincinnati and other cities in Ohio, Kentucky, and elsewhere. Some estimates place the value of its portfolio as high as $500 million at its height.
As it bought up Cincinnati properties, it sometimes caused controversy.
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Vision & Beyond purchased the 24-unit Court View Apartments Downtown in April 2021 and soon after served 30-day notices that its residents would need to leave. Residents there said that created hardship as they struggled to find other affordable housing, even with a two-week extension the company offered. Vision & Beyond indicated it had pressing plans to renovate the property. But it has been vacant ever since.
“We understand and we empathize with all of our residents in the building,” then-Vision & Beyond spokesperson Stacey Walton told Cincinnati City Council. “There is a lot that gets involved with a redevelopment. We do have a development schedule that we are needing to adhere to, and so thus we have given the residents a 30-day notice.”
In an August 2021 op-ed in the Cincinnati Enquirer Grinberg, responding to the controversy over Court View, defended Vision & Beyond’s business practices, suggested the Court View building needed massive upgrades and said criticism against he and Gizunterman amounted to anti-semitism.
“The truth is, Vision & Beyond is pleased to be investing in apartment buildings in neighborhoods including Clifton, Avondale, Westwood, Price Hill and Walnut Hills.” he wrote. “We have rehabbed more than 2,000 apartment units in Cincinnati — a majority of which have involved Class C workforce housing — serving people who work in our local restaurants, hotels and hospitals. These developments have been overlooked by Cincinnati’s developers for many years. We are proud to make improvements in working-class housing, and we know that many of our tenants are proud to call our developments home.”
Foreclosure troubles
The city’s filing alleges Vision & Beyond began running into trouble in 2023 over conditions at its properties. The company responded that it was having difficulties getting capital from its investors.
In October 2024, a lending entity called SCCRE Court Vine Lender LLC filed foreclosure proceedings on several Vision & Beyond properties Downtown. That month, the city also filed legal action regarding the condition of properties Vision & Beyond owned Downtown.
In November 2024, another entity called Wilmington Trust filed in Hamilton County seeking to foreclose on about 25 of the company’s other Cincinnati holdings. Wilmington Trust alleged the company had failed to pay mortgages on those properties starting in June 2024.
Wilmington also requested the court appoint a receiver for the properties, alleging that Vision & Beyond leadership had fled the country and were unresponsive. The court appointed a company called Trigild, which has been managing some of the properties since with a subcontracted company called Peak.
Nick Swartsell
/
WVXU
A WVXU reporter observed a notice taped to the door of a large apartment complex in Mount Airy advising residents about the receivership, with Trigild’s contact information along with that of another temporary property manager.
A glass door leading into the complex’s main building with a number of apartments and the rental office was boarded over, and trash was piled up outside. One resident was in the parking lot packing up a van. She said she was moving her mother out of her unit. She claimed she’d had issues with her heat and plumbing during her time there that were not addressed right away.
Fraud allegations
Last month, Wilmington filed again in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court indicating that Vision & Beyond did not seem to own the properties it had taken out mortgages on.
“Plaintiff has received a title search that indicates that, as a part of a believed fraudulent scheme, none of the properties were titled in the name of the defendant at the time of the origination of the loan held by plaintiff, which means, effectively, that plaintiff’s mortgage is likely worthless,” attorneys for Wilmington wrote in a December 23 filing. “This development comes as a complete surprise to the plaintiff.”
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A separate December filing in Hamilton County Court by two local investors and another based in Chicago illustrate that alleged fraudulent scheme. Their lawsuit claims Grinberg and Gizunterman conspired with others associated with the firm to carry out a massive and complex scam to trick investors.
The investors who filed the suit allege Vision & Beyond secretly used straw buyers to purchase a West End multi-family property for $526,000 in 2021. The company then sold it to an LLC it owned with the investors for $1.3 million and pocketed the profits.
Six months later, the suit alleges, Grinberg transferred the property to a trust he owns. The filing alleges the West End property was later rolled in with a number of others in the Vision & Beyond portfolio — many also owned by LLCs funded by investors — as collateral on one of two mortgages the company took out in December 2022 worth about $36 million. The company defaulted on those loans in July last year, the suit alleges.
What’s next?
DiNardo says the issues illustrate the downsides to large, investor-driven residential property companies.
“One thing we’ve noticed is that a lot of the failures of landlords in the city of Cincinnati and Hamilton County in the past couple years have primarily been these out-of-town investors who come into town, buy up lots of property, do a poor job of managing it, and then have financial issues or some other problem and abandon them,” he said.
The cases against Vision & Beyond are ongoing. In the meantime, it’s unclear who will ultimately own and manage the properties in the middle of the legal battles.
Carter, the Mount Auburn tenant who lives next to Vision & Beyond’s offices, is hoping for clarity on the situation soon. He likes his current apartment’s location because it’s peaceful. But he understands the property will probably eventually be sold and renovated when the lawsuits all settle.
“It all depends on what the banks do,” he said. “Would I like to stay here? I would. I really would.”