"With crisis comes opportunity.""Behind every great fortune there is a great crime."--Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein at Davos in 2008
Mother Jones reported on evictions of tenants with flawless payment histories in Brooklyn. Greenbrook Partners is a New York based private equity underwriter (PEU) with a real estate focus.
On at least 36 of its properties, it held mortgages in collaboration with The Carlyle Group, one of the nation’s largest private equity firms. Meanwhile, Greenbrook’s flipping strategy was already making money: Within a month of one household’s exit at 70 PPW, their three-bedroom had been spruced up and rented for $7,595 per month, according to its listing on the local website StreetEasy—nearly double the previous rent. (The Carlyle Group did not respond to requests for comment.)
Greenbrook's executive team includes a former BlackRock real estate person.
Fred LeCao worked in real estate investing at BlackRock during the 2008 financial crisis, when the mammoth investment firm cashed in on the deluge of foreclosures that engulfed millions of families during the Great Recession by buying up bad mortgages on the cheap using the government’s money, and then waiting for those investments to appreciate.
Recall Trump Treasury Chief Steven Mnuchin was known as The Foreclosure King for robo-evicting thousands of California homeowners in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
IndyMac which became OneWest “rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.”
Current Vice President Kamala Harris chose not to charge Mnuchin's bank with illegally evicting people as California's Attorney General.
We'll see if the Texas Permanent School Fund (TPSF) takes any concrete action on their significant investment in tenant evictor Greenbrook. The Carlyle Group has a long history of making obscene profits and successfully lobbying away removal of private equity's preferred taxation.
Politicians Red and Blue love PEU and increasingly, more are one.
Update 9-21-22: Carlyle bought another Brooklyn rental property for $17 million.
Update 5-31-23: Greenbrook sold three NYC properties to Townhouse Rental II, an entity associated with the Carlyle Group. Carlyle's partner was found to have “engaged in dangerously negligent conduct in the ownership, management, and operation of the buildings,” such as construction that at times left tenants without water, heat or gas.
