RICO Class Action Against Build Realty's House-Flipping Scheme Settles for $1.3 Million

For roughly six years, Build Realty -- operating under the name Greenleaf Funding -- plastered more than 5,000 road signs across Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky advertising a simple pitch: flip houses with only $10,000 down and no credit check required. The company backed that pitch with websites, social media, and free seminars. Hundreds of aspiring real estate investors signed on.

What those investors got, according to the federal lawsuit, bore little resemblance to what was advertised. Build Realty claimed to buy properties in bulk and pass the savings to clients. In practice, it purchased homes at market rates, marked them up, and resold them to investors. Worse, buyers who believed they were purchasing properties outright were structured instead as beneficiaries of trusts -- leaving them without clear ownership rights and vulnerable when deals collapsed.

The scheme, which ran from 2013 to 2019, was layered across multiple corporate entities -- including Compound Property Management, First Title Agency, and GT Financial -- that the lawsuit alleged operated as alter egos, commingling funds and sharing employees. The legal theory was civil RICO, with mail fraud as the predicate act. Under federal law, proven racketeering damages are tripled, which raised the potential exposure for the defendants.

Individual investors described severe losses. One plaintiff lost $30,000 on a single North Avondale property. Another lost $70,000 across two Deer Park homes. A third investor spent two and a half years renovating a Walnut Hills property and lost $160,000 plus that labor when Build Realty took the property back. Many class members lost their investments through foreclosure or resale by the company itself.

Bill Markovits, working alongside the Finney Law Firm, filed the case in the Southern District of Ohio in 2019. In February 2023, U.S. District Judge Douglas Cole certified the lawsuit as a class action, covering an estimated 200 to 300 people who had paid at least $10,000 to join the program, plus a sub-class of approximately 40 investors who lost properties through default or resale. Judge Cole gave preliminary approval to a $1.3 million settlement on March 31, 2023. Under the settlement, each class member was eligible to collect between $1,600 and $20,000 depending on documented losses.