Tag: Weekend Reads

It’s no secret that times are tough for landlords around Temple University.

An eight-bedroom rowhouse at 1734 N. Gratz St., for example, languished on the real estate market after being listed for sale, like many dormlike apartments left in the wake of a rental boom that fizzled amid declining student enrollment.

The property went up for sale in April 2024 for $475,000 — $40,000 less than the owner had paid two years prior. It sat on the market for one year with no takers.

Then real estate agent Patrick C. Fay got involved.

In April 2025, the Gratz Street rowhouse was re-listed for $875,000. The very same day, it was listed as a pending sale, with Fay representing the buyer, according to real estate data from the Realtors Multiple Listing Service.

An Inquirer review of 33 other sales Fay brokered over the last year showed a similar pattern.

After properties went unsold at lower prices, Fay stepped in as the buyer’s agent and almost immediately arranged a sale for anywhere from $290,000 to nearly $550,000 more than sellers originally asked for.

On average, Fay’s clients have paid about double the original listing.

Fay, who worked out of Coldwell Banker’s offices in Old City and Moorestown, Burlington County, has now represented buyers in at least $40 million worth of settled or pending real estate deals involving multifamily properties around Temple.

(After this article published online Friday, the real estate firm cut ties with Fay and his biographical page was removed from its site. “The agent is no longer affiliated with Coldwell Banker Realty,” a company spokesperson said by email.)

Of about a dozen properties in the area that sold for more than $750,000 over the last 90 days, every one listed Fay as the buyer’s agent.

The Inquirer’s examination of the deals found the sales involve a small group of repeat buyers, including two linked to an earlier prosecution over a 2000s-era mortgage fraud scheme. In that case, federal investigators found that the group was involved with purchasing distressed homes using artificially inflated mortgages, pocketing the excess money and allowing the properties to lapse into foreclosure.

Fay, who is one of the top agents in his Coldwell office, said his transactions were all aboveboard. He credited the high sale prices to rebounding demand for student housing in the Temple University area.

“I think it’s a desirable area for sure,” said Fay, who lives in Moorestown. “They just had their biggest enrollment of all time.”

Actually, Temple’s head of admissions resigned last month after the university missed its annual enrollment goal. Its student population remains below 30,000, down from a high eight years ago of more than 40,000.

“This is not a good time for being a property owner around Temple,” said Nick Pizzola, vice president of the Temple Area Property Association, a group that represents many landlords and was formed to “encourage responsible development and property management” in the area.

“Rents are down, vacancies are up,” he said. “It’s a buyer’s market.”

The financing on Fay’s sales is provided by higher-risk private lenders, which grew in popularity as conventional bank lending contracted in the wake of the 2008 real estate crash.

Jon Hornik, head of the National Private Lenders Association, a trade group that represents firms like the ones that lent to Fay’s clients, recently flagged sales around Temple on a watch list the group maintains for suspicious transactions.

He had a simple explanation for these market-defying sales.

“These are bad actors inflating the value of the real estate through the sale structure, and therefore borrowing more money than they really should be able to,” Hornik said in an interview. “There’s real estate there. There’s a borrower there. But the values are off.”

Fay, who describes himself on Instagram as a partner in the upscale Center City Irish bar the Mulberry, has been pursued in New Jersey Superior Court by seven credit card companies or lenders in connection with roughly $57,000 in debts. Most were linked to unpaid credit card bills, and most have ended in default judgments.

Business records show Fay is listed as debtor to an Atlanta-based company called Real Commissions, which lets real estate agents tap into cash based solely on the promise of a forthcoming commission, so long as they have a signed agreement of sale in hand.

In an email Thursday, Fay cited several 2022 student rental sales in the $800,000 to $900,000 range to support his sale prices, insisting that “at no point did either party set or influence those values.” He did not respond to questions about why his clients would pay twice what a seller had initially been asking.

The real estate agent’s narrative of a booming rental market around Temple was also disputed by a recent seller in one of his deals.

The former property owner, who asked not to be named because he feared legal repercussions, acknowledged that he tried to unload his rental property last year but found no takers. He said his real estate agent then brought him Fay’s offer to broker a sale for $875,000, which he said was actually just the amount that would be recorded on the deed.

In reality, he said, he made the sale for only $385,000, or $15,000 less than what it was originally listed for.

The seller said he knew the deal was suspicious, but his agent advised him that he was unlikely to find a better deal.

“I had a mortgage, but I couldn’t get any renters,” the seller explained. “It’s called desperation.”

He took the deal, recording an official sale price that was more than $250,000 higher than any comparable properties recently sold on that block.

Then, another property across the street sold in June for the exact same price — $875,000 — shortly after being re-listed from $475,000.

The real estate agent on that sale: Pat Fay.

‘Strange stuff’

Historically a commuter school, Temple has long had room for just a fraction of its total student body in traditional dorms. But as Philadelphia’s fortunes improved in the 20th century and more students sought to live on or near campus, the housing shortage intensified.

Private developers stepped in. Blocks that had long served as home to mostly Black working-class residents transformed into rows of student housing units, sometimes prefabricated.

But during the pandemic, the boom in rentals came to a grinding halt. Classes went virtual, driving student renters away. Surging homicide rates — including the 2023 shooting death of a Temple police officer — drove a public-safety crisis for the university.

Recently, Temple president John Fry announced a plan to steer more students back to campus with the university’s first new dorm in years.

Today, even with homicide rates now at historic lows and enrollment creeping up again, many of the blocks once flooded with student housing are underpopulated.

For-rent and for-sale signs line both sides of the 1700 block of Arlington Street. Around the corner, on 18th Street, mailboxes overflow with unopened letters, and the chirps of dying smoke detector batteries in vacant units create an eerie birdsong.

Pizzola said membership is down in the Temple Area Property Association as building owners have looked to get out of the rental business.

“Since COVID hit, it just turned the market upside down,” he said. “If you’re an investor who was buying off-campus housing right before COVID, you got slaughtered.”

Bart Blatstein, a developer who was heavily involved in the mid-2000s Temple-area housing boom, said the recent transactions are highly unusual.

“I’ll give you a commission if you can get twice what my properties are worth,” Blatstein joked.

Officially, more than 40 different corporations have purchased student rental buildings in sales brokered by Fay. But those companies trace back to a handful of purchasers, according to Pennsylvania corporate registries.

Some of these buyers, contacted by The Inquirer, described Fay more as a participant among a loose but unnamed group of “real estate investors,” rather than a mere agent.

Stephen L. Johnson, a Montgomery County resident, was linked to companies involved in six purchases, totaling $5.2 million. Several of the companies were registered to the home of Johnson’s mother, although in an interview she said she was unaware her rowhouse was being used as a nominal corporate headquarters and referred questions to her son.

Reached by phone, Johnson echoed Fay’s enthusiasm for the future of the real estate market around Temple, predicting a surge in values if the university seeks to expand.

“The investment was all about Temple buying up everything and making it better,” Johnson said of his purchases. “In 10 or 20 years, they’ll probably own all of North Philly.”

Johnson could not explain why one of his companies, 17th Street Estates LLC, had paid so much for properties like 2113 N. 17th St., which was listed for $475,000 but sold for $900,000.

“I’d have to talk to Patrick about that,” said Johnson, who referred to Fay as “the main guy.”

“It’s like a team,” he added. “We all help each other out.”

Another one of Fay’s clients, Tanjania Powell-Avery of Pottstown, Montgomery County, is a former real estate agent charged in 2010 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a mortgage fraud ring.

Prosecutors said Powell-Avery aided two men who “purchased distressed properties at low prices, found buyers for the properties at a much higher price, and submitted false documents to the mortgage lender in support of mortgage applications,” according to the federal indictment. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation and nine months’ house arrest.

Despite this, and a 2012 bankruptcy, companies linked to Powell-Avery appeared in at least two recent sales around Temple, both brokered by Fay. These companies tapped $1.3 million in mortgages to close sales with a combined value of $1.6 million — each for about double its initial listing price.

Powell-Avery did not respond to a request for comment.

Her two codefendants in the 2010 federal indictment, Joseph Tookes and Othniel Tookes, also pleaded guilty. Both men are relatives of Abigail Tookes, a resident of a Norristown apartment complex who was pursued by creditors in 2020 after defaulting on a loan, leading to a $46,067 court judgment against her.

Even so, companies tied to Abigail Tookes were linked to at least $3.4 million in mortgages to finance the acquisition of at least five properties in sales involving Fay. In all five purchases, Tookes’ company recorded sale prices at double the original values.

Reached by phone, Tookes insisted the sales were “totally legitimate transactions.”

“There’s no fraudulent activity. It’s just an investment group,” she said. “There’s no story here. These are real estate transactions between the buyers and sellers. They all agreed to the sale. It doesn’t matter why.”

Other people linked to companies in Fay’s sales — Patrick M. Williams, Miles Fambro, and Angel Rodriguez — did not return calls for comment.

Many of the Temple-area sales featured the same mortgage broker: Viva Capital Group.

Reached by email, Viva president Juan Arguello said his Florida-based company operated “in full accordance with state and federal guidelines, rules, and regulations” and does “not have any contact with the sellers or their agents.”

He also said his company relied on an outside appraisal management company to approve mortgage values. He did not respond to questions about which appraiser had been used to support the Philadelphia sales.

Pizzola, who owns student-rental properties in the area, said these recent sale prices would eventually start driving up neighborhood property assessments, leading to higher tax bills, particularly on blocks where Fay’s clients have purchased multiple properties.

He said he suspects there is fraud involved.

“The fact that you’re seeing multiple sales at twice the average market value, it doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said.

Uncertain future

A prospectus for a property on Cecil B. Moore Avenue, listed for sale at $850,000 in October by several other real estate agents, included a string of Fay’s recent sales as comparable sales to justify the high asking price.

That property has yet to sell.

Over the last three weeks, at least three more properties near Temple have gone under contract — all with Fay as real estate agent.

Fay had been listed as an agent on a large apartment complex on the 1300 block of North Broad Street that was listed for sale at just under $6 million in late October. In November, the property was re-listed for $12 million.

But this week the listing was removed altogether.

The city has begun placing liens for unpaid water bills on the buildings in some of the earliest deals Fay arranged. Many of the properties have skipped out on biannual commercial trash hauling fees imposed by the city.

Some of the buildings do not appear to be occupied.

This week, on the 1700 block of Fontain Street, where in 2010 developers were racing to put up prefabricated student rowhouses in time for the fall semester, mail had piled up outside two buildings that Fay clients bought this year for $875,000 each.

Someone appeared to have busted open a door, which was ajar with broken locks. A Temple sticker was on an upstairs window.

Hornik, from the NPLA, said that unless Fay’s purchasers figure out a way to extract enough rental income from these properties to cover mortgage costs, a mass foreclosure by lenders was likely in North Philadelphia — leaving the ownership of dozens of properties up in the air.

“If the loan goes negative, the lender has to foreclose,” he said, “and they’re not going to recover that money.”