An out-of-town investment firm bought 153 Cleveland homes and now holds a local real estate portfolio riddled with vacancy, code violation notices and maintenance complaints from tenants, a group of housing advocates said in a study released Wednesday.
Authored by the community organizing group ACORN and the Vacant and Abandoned Properties Action Council, the study found that 79% of the homes appeared to be vacant.
The study called for the city to bring a public nuisance lawsuit against the Maryland-based company, Riparian Capital Partners. Cleveland helped with research for the study.
Riparian CEO Kristoffer Garin told Signal Cleveland that his company was a victim of a fraudulent scheme by the properties’ seller, an investment firm named Voyager Pacific Capital Management. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Voyager this year, and its CEO pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud.
An attorney for Voyager’s CEO disputed Garin’s characterization of Riparian as a victim.
The report offers a case study in how Cleveland neighborhoods have become caught up in business deals the world over. In the long wake of the 2008 foreclosure crisis, investors scooped up cheap Cleveland homes, hoping to turn a profit by reselling or renting them out.
Frank Ford, a VAPAC member and longtime property researcher who edited the study, said investors have viewed Cleveland as a “monopoly game.” But they also miscalculated the city’s housing market, he said.
“They often find themselves sitting on an inventory that they’re surprised to find it’s in worse condition than they thought,” he told Signal Cleveland.
Garin said his company’s goal had been to preserve long-term workforce housing. Now Riparian is working with its lenders to turn homes over to buyers who could “get them habitable and functional again,” he said. His firm was up against “financial and operational headwinds” in doing so, he said.
“We’re moving as quickly as we can to get those assets into the right hands,” he said.
Garin said he was limited in what he could say about the properties because they were caught up in a fraud case in which Riparian was a “direct victim.”
Jeff Hammerschmidt, an attorney who represents Voyager CEO David Hardcastle, rejected that idea.
“Riparian knew what they were getting into when they made the purchase,” Hammerschmidt said in a phone interview.
A spokesperson for U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, which is prosecuting the case against Hardcastle, said the office does not identify victims.
City Hall to owners of ‘derelict’ homes: ‘We’re going to find you’
The properties have racked up code violation notices from the City of Cleveland. The city has issued 101 violation notices, written 191 civil tickets and brought 19 cases against the company in Cleveland Housing Court, Building and Housing Director Sally Martin O’Toole said.
Riparian has appealed nine code violations and paid 38 of the tickets, according to O’Toole. The company has hired an attorney to represent it in its code violation appeals and in the housing court cases.
Although O’Toole met with Riparian representatives last year, she said was not told that the company was a fraud victim.
Pursuing a lawsuit over the properties was “on the table,” for the city, she said. City staff are keeping an eye on investor activity, she added.
“You can’t get away with just doing whatever you want to do and hanging on [to] a bunch of derelict properties forever,” O’Toole said. “We’re going to find you and we’re going to take action against you.”
A web of LLCs sells dozens of homes to a new buyer
Riparian acquired 172 Cuyahoga County properties in 2025, including 153 homes in Cleveland according to the study.
The seller was an archipelago of limited liability companies linked to a company accused of defrauding investors, property records show. Several of the LLCs were named for islands in the Bahamas: Cross Cay, Spanish Cay and North Bimini, for instance.
VAPAC traced those companies back to Voyager Pacific Capital Management, the investment firm that was sued this year by the SEC. Hardcastle, Voyager’s CEO, signed the deeds on behalf of the LLCs when the companies sold the homes, property records show.
Founded in 2015, Voyager raised $100 million from about 500 investors for a real estate fund that held 1,200 properties, according to the SEC lawsuit.
Hardcastle was indicted in federal court in California in early 2025 and charged in a second case, this one related to Voyager, in 2026. He pleaded guilty this year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in both cases, court records show.
Hardcastle gave false information to participants in a Voyager investment fund while using money to pay other participants and “for personal investments,” according to the plea agreement. He and others artificially inflated the value of the fund by selling properties in disrepair to themselves, the agreement said.
“The sales were paper sales only and no money changed hands,” the plea agreement said. “Hardcastle and others at Voyager made the sales because they did not have sufficient capital to maintain or improve the properties and they were prohibited from incurring debt on the properties based on their agreements with the participants.”
Voyager sold a large portion of its holdings at a discount to an unnamed third party in mid-2024, according to the plea agreement and SEC suit. It was replaced as the fund’s manager in July 2025, the suit said. The property transfers from Voyager companies to Riparian are dated April 2025, Cuyahoga County records show.
As part of the plea deal, Hardcastle agreed to pay nearly $45 million in restitution. He is scheduled for sentencing later this year.
Study finds vacant homes and maintenance problems
To prepare the study, VAPAC researched the properties and ACORN organizers canvassed neighborhoods to speak with tenants and those who lived nearby. The city’s Building and Housing Department provided data on code violation notices and tickets it issued to the properties, Ford said.
Riparian bought more than 170 in Cuyahoga County in 2025, according to the study. Of that, 153 properties were in Cleveland. Most of them appeared to be vacant, the study said.
The properties were purchased by two limited liability companies named after Riparian. Garin signed for a $35 million open-end mortgage on the company’s Cleveland holdings, records show.
ACORN organizers “found evidence of disrepair and neglect and few signs of active rehabilitation,” the study said. “Tenants reported living in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.”
Tenants described such issues as basement drainage problems, peeling paint, a deteriorating porch vulnerable to mice and difficulty reaching maintenance staff, according to the study.
Most of the properties are on the majority-Black East Side, the study said. Half are in Wards 9 and 10, which cover such neighborhoods as Glenville and Collinwood.
The study recommends more than a lawsuit. It calls on the city to perform interior inspections of Riparian homes in addition to exterior ones. It also recommends that City Hall inform tenants they have a right to reposit their rent with Cleveland Housing Court until management makes repairs.
A boarded-up home and an open door
Signal Cleveland visited two Riparian properties on the West Side on Monday.
The windows and doors at one home, at 2117 W. 80th St., had been boarded up. At the edge of the overgrown front yard sat a pile of assorted trash: a Christmas-themed cactus cat tree, a foam pad, a small doorway gate, some cushions and other refuse.
Trash and mail littered the porch at a double at 3252 W. 90th St.
The house has been in the hands of investors for nearly a decade, property records show. A prior owner, SBAR Holdings LLC, played a key role in a wave of Swedish property investments that were the subject of reporting by Signal Cleveland and the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in 2024.
An open front door could be seen through the screen door of the downstairs apartment. Signal Cleveland knocked. No one answered.
