Your Money. Their Problem.

Apr 26, 2026

A friend of mine lost $250,000 a few weeks ago.

Multifamily syndication. Texas. He was an LP on the deal. Wrote a check, got some quarterly updates for a while, and then one day the communication just...stopped.

No call. No explanation. No vote. No exit.

Just gone.

And he’s not the only one.

Over the last 12 to 18 months, the multifamily syndication world has been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) falling apart. Properties foreclosed on. GPs going bankrupt. LPs finding out their entire investment is wiped out through a letter, or worse, through silence.

This isn’t rumor. This is public record.

Tides Equities, the LA-based syndicator that bought up nearly 15,000 apartment units across the Sun Belt between 2021 and 2023, has been losing properties to foreclosure across Texas. Their own co-founder told investors that 20% of the portfolio was in distress. Lenders have personally sued the principals. Original LP investors? In some deals, their equity is expected to be completely wiped out. https://therealdeal.com/texas/dallas/2025/01/10/tides-equities-loses-texas-multifamily-property-to-foreclosure/

Lurin Capital, a Dallas-based syndicator that once managed 10,000 units across 19 markets, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Multiple times. For multiple properties. They’ve lost properties to foreclosure in Florida and Texas. Lenders have accused them of defaulting on over $700 million in loans. And the guy who ran it? He left Dallas for an $18 million mansion in Aspen. Morgan Stanley has since foreclosed on that too. https://therealdeal.com/texas/2026/04/22/lurin-capital-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-protection-5/

In January alone, over $400 million in distressed multifamily properties were headed for auction across Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

And those are just the ones making headlines.

The Part That Should Bother You

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

In most of these deals, the LPs had no control. No deed in their name. No collateral they could point to. No ability to exit when things started going sideways. And in a lot of cases, no communication from the GP until it was too late.

You hand over $100K, $250K, sometimes $500K or more. You get a nice pitch deck. Maybe a quarterly email with some charts. And then you wait. You wait for someone else to manage the property, someone else to make the debt payments, someone else to decide when to sell, and someone else to tell you whether your money is safe.

And when it’s not safe? You’re last in line.

That’s the structure. The LP is the most exposed person in the deal with the least amount of control. And when the market turns or the operator makes bad decisions or the debt blows up, the LP is the one holding the bag.

I’m not saying all syndications are bad. Some operators are communicating openly, working through problems, and doing right by their investors. But the last 18 months have made something painfully clear.

A lot of people trusted the wrong operator with a lot of money. And they had no mechanism to protect themselves when things went wrong.

There’s Another Way

What if you could invest passively in real estate, earn a consistent return, and actually control your money?

That’s what private money lending is.

Here’s the simple version. You lend money to a real estate operator to buy and renovate a specific property. That property is secured by a deed of trust in your name. You hold a promissory note with a defined interest rate, a defined timeline, and in most cases a personal guarantee from the borrower. You know exactly which property your money is in. You know exactly when you’re getting paid back. And if the borrower doesn’t perform, you have collateral. Real collateral. A house. Not a share of an LLC that owns a piece of a property that’s managed by someone who might or might not return your call.

If you want to become liquid sooner, you can even sell the note and get the majority of your principal back, sometimes more depending on how the deal is structured. Try doing that as an LP in a syndication.

And here’s the part nobody talks about. If the worst case happens and the borrower defaults, you can take the property. You have the asset. In a syndication, if the GP defaults, you have a lawyer and a prayer. As a private money lender, you have a deed of trust and a house.

You would never want it to come to that. And that’s the point. The real skill in private money lending isn’t just picking good deals. It’s learning to underwrite the borrower. The operator. Their track record. Their systems. Their reputation. That’s where the protection really lives.

Typical terms in this space? On my deals, I pay my lenders 2 points, 10% annual interest, accrued (meaning no monthly payments on their end), 12-month balloon. But as a lender, you set your own terms depending on the borrower, the deal, and the risk. You have that power. That’s the whole point.

I currently owe about $5 million to private money lenders across my deals. I have access to about $13 million in committed capital from people who have lent to me repeatedly. Some for years.

Why do they keep coming back? Because they know exactly where their money is, they hold the security instrument, and they get paid.

The Meeting That Changed Everything

Years ago, my escrow attorney referred me to a potential lender. 81 years old. Sold a furniture company decades earlier. Had a business card with one word on it and a phone number.

We met at a Starbucks. I showed him everything from my phone. Active projects. Before and afters. P&Ls. My systems.

About 15 minutes in, he stopped me.

“You run a business. I’m good. If you need to borrow money, let me know.”

He didn’t ask me for a pitch deck. He didn’t need a pro forma with aggressive assumptions. He looked at how I ran my operation and made a decision in 15 minutes.

That’s what good underwriting looks like from the lender’s side. You’re not betting on a deal. You’re betting on an operator. And when you can see the business is real, the systems are real, and the track record is real, the lending decision gets simple.

Why I’m Teaching This

I’ve been borrowing private money for over a decade. It changed my business. But here’s the other side of that equation. The people lending to me are earning consistent, secured returns backed by real property. And right now, with what’s happening in the syndication world, a lot of people with $100K or more sitting in an account are wondering where the hell to put it.

The stock market is all over the place. Syndications have burned a lot of trust. CDs and T-bills barely keep up with inflation. And a lot of people want exposure to real estate without having to flip houses or manage tenants or trust a GP they’ve never met.

Private money lending is that option. And almost nobody teaches it.

On May 6th, I’m doing a free live webinar where I’m breaking down exactly how private money lending works. Not from the borrower’s side. From the lender’s side. How to evaluate a borrower. How the security works. What a deed of trust actually protects. How the returns compare. What to look for and what to avoid.

If you’ve got capital to deploy and you want to learn how to put it to work in real estate without giving up control, this is for you.

https://www.tarlyarber.com/privatemoney101

It’s free. May 6th. Show up.

Tarl Yarber

(Once again, I personally write these...)

Private Lending 101 - Register Free

One More Thing

This has nothing to do with real estate. But it might matter more than anything I just wrote.

My wife Grace and I are attending the Thriving Families Retreat in San Diego. It’s led by Lonnie and Shelley Gienger. Two days. Limited to 75 couples. It’s specifically for couples who’ve been intentional about success but maybe haven’t been equally intentional about where their family is going.

Grace and I will be there. Hope to see you too.

Use code family to save $500.