You may have heard that Alan Stalcup is a fraudster. He’s trying to change that.
Stalcup was a multifamily syndicator who made big bucks for investors — until he didn’t. Part of a wave of syndicators that ultimately crashed and burned post-pandemic, Stalcup’s GVA was roiled by interest rates before lawsuits came from every angle. Investors accused him of taking their money and forging documents.
Now, he’s trying to change his image. He’s hired a public relations firm and is engaging in a media tour to try to sell his side of the story: the investors are just sour and the allegations are bunk, as he tells it.
Stalcup needs the trust of investors and lenders to keep GVA working.
“It’s tough to do new ventures, to have a negative reputation,” Stalcup said in an interview with The Real Deal. “It’s tough to borrow money.”
Stalcup said he wants to set the headlines straight. But his court filings and public comments paint a picture of a man determined to clear his name at any cost, even if his story doesn’t always add up.
“You’re an investor and you want some remedies,” he said of his accusers. “If you’re angry and you’re stuck, how do you actually get money? Well, you have to claim fraud.”
Among multifamily syndicators, GVA was big. The company went on a spending spree in the Sun Belt, growing at a clip rivaling Tides Equities. The company compiled funds from individuals and institutions to buy up and manage underperforming apartment buildings, on top of collecting management fees from investors.
As Stalcup tells it, this was a rewarding experience, fixing up homes formerly owned by slumlords and giving families new refrigerators for the first time. When interest rates were low, it seemed like an okay bet. Stalcup says he was making a 42 percent return on investors’ money in two years.
But the good times could not continue. The Federal Reserve began to raise rates. In 2023, an analysis by The Real Deal found that GVA was among the top firms exposed to floating-rate debt.
Stalcup says he was completely blindsided by the hikes, which started in 2022, calling them a “black swan event.”
“Eleven rate hikes in 17 months,” Stalcup said. “Here we are in the back half of ‘23 and you’re looking at your debt service tripling.”
As the company began defaulting on its loans, a wave of legal action rose up, with lenders and investors lobbing fraud allegations.
In February 2025, lender Benefit Street Partners accused GVA in New York of “committing forgery and fraud that would make even brazen criminals blush.” The lender said GVA misappropriated insurance proceeds, co-mingled tenant security deposits and let the buildings underlying the loan fall into waste and disrepair. That would activate personal guarantees on $346 million in loans. Discovery and depositions have started in that case.
Starwood followed, slapping Stalcup personally with a trio of lawsuits that summer, also hoping to collect on personal guarantees. The lender won summary judgments for all three cases by late April. Starwood sought a total of $110 million. A New York court ordered a judgment of $7.9 million against Stalcup in one case, but the total judgment he’s personally liable for hinges on discovery. Stalcup has moved to appeal all three cases.
A June 2024 suit by Overwatch Fund and investor Ben Loughry was followed by allegations from Texas investor Bryan Kastleman, who said Stalcup was “cooking the books.” Documents and screenshots appeared to show Stalcup and his wife, Loren, of repackaging bad debt as assets.
Stalcup says it’s all fake. The screenshots and documents showing requests to repackage debt as assets? Stalcup said they were stolen and doctored by a former employee. (He and that former GVA employee, Zachary Richards, have traded lawsuits. A lawyer for Richards did not respond to a request for comment.) More recently, he released a press release about an expert report in the case, which argued that the transfers were consistent with IRS rules.
Stalcup is trying to shake off the legal troubles. If he can defeat the fraud allegations and clear his name, maybe he can make his way back to the top. But inconsistencies in his story raise questions about his credibility.
Smoke and fire
In press releases and an interview with TRD, Stalcup said Overwatch’s suits were dismissed, pointing to those dismissals as evidence of his clean hands. But the reality is more complicated.
“What I think you’ve seen with Overwatch, after 18 months and spending a lot of money, [they’ve] come to the conclusion, ‘Hey, maybe I was angry, but maybe there’s some smoke, but there’s no fire,’” Stalcup said.
In a press release, Stalcup and GVA said Overwatch had “reassessed the facts” and came to the realization that the lawsuits were meritless, pointing to that as the reason they were dismissed.
“None of that is true,” an attorney for Overwatch wrote in court documents. The firm accused Stalcup of trying to spread a false narrative about the reasons for the dismissal.
Stalcup told TRD that there was no settlement in the Overwatch suit. However, court documents show Overwatch withdrew its suit after coming to a business agreement with Stalcup, and emails from the company discuss payouts for investors. Stalcup said the business agreement was entirely separate from the decision by the plaintiffs to withdraw.
In emails submitted to the court, Stalcup appears to engage in a quid pro quo for public relations. He asked Overwatch principal Ben Loughry to release a public statement saying that the fraud allegations were “completely false and entirely fabricated,” offering to drop a deposition request in return.
“If you are good with this and not breaching our business resolution agreement, I’m good dropping the 202,” Stalcup wrote, referring to the petition to depose members of Overwatch.
“It is amazing you want to dictate my opinion,” Loughry wrote back. “I will do what is right.”
However, Loughry appears to have been convinced to at least issue some sort of statement.
He has since signed a carefully-worded affidavit — provided to TRD by Stalcup’s media team at Razor Sharp PR — saying that Overwatch was unable to find any evidence that “GVA had transferred at least $100 million into trusts in order to defraud creditors.”
Some have accused Stalcup of an effort to mislead the public.
“Overwatch’s recent court filings make clear that this affidavit resulted from a bad faith pressure campaign by Stalcup,” Ephraim Wernick, an attorney for Kastleman’s companies, said in a statement. “This weak document was all he could extract to use in his ongoing PR campaign to mislead the public and smear the good names of victims like my client.”
Getting personal
As part of his public campaign, Stalcup has attempted to brand those suing him as bad actors.
In an interview with TRD, Stalcup said Kastleman had engaged in a nine-month campaign of harassment and intimidation against him and his family, including sending letters impersonating his wife.
Court documents show he has accused Doug Jensen, another investor who sued Stalcup through an LLC, of the exact same thing, including the letter impersonating his wife.
When asked about the dual accusations, a spokesperson for Stalcup accused the two investors of coordinating on a harassment campaign.
“Do I have a smoking gun that proves it is him? No,” Stalcup said when pressed about the accusation. He said he still has reason to believe, however.
Stalcup has also painted Kastleman as someone with a decades-long criminal history. He told TRD that Kastleman had faced multiple felonies.
However, that too appears to be misleading. A search by TRD turned up three misdemeanors in the 1980s and 1990s, which his lawyer says were dismissed. When asked about this, Stalcup said he was speaking informally and still believes any criminal history is relevant.
Stalcup has at times targeted his public relations campaign against attorneys working against him. He claimed Wernick, Kastleman’s attorney, was under investigation by the state bar association after he submitted a complaint accusing the lawyer of extortion. That complaint was dismissed.
Stalcup has been doing his best to make the rounds. In recent months, he’s sat for interviews with the Austin American-Statesman and the Promote, along with TRD.
One of his most recent press hits was a sponsored Q&A posted on Multifamily Dive.
“Reality is complex,” Stalcup says at the conclusion of the Q&A. “That means it is often easier to take a headline at face value than it is to evaluate the facts of the matter.”
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