Saskatoon mortgage broker says Epic Alliance investors could be left hanging

A Saskatoon mortgage broker believes investors across Canada who put their money into a company called Epic Alliance may be left with a huge headache.

The Saskatoon real estate investment company, run by Alisa Thompson and Rochelle Laflamme, collapsed at the end of January.

Conrad Neufeldt said it was a landlord and property management company for hundreds of homes in the core area of Saskatoon and in North Battleford. It was tailored to investors across the country who didn’t want to manage the properties themselves.

Investors would provide money for homes that needed to be fixed up. Epic Alliance would fix up the homes and sell them to a second investor pool, while providing return guarantees to the initial investors.

The second pool would then buy homes under a “hassle free landlord program,” and lease them back to Epic Alliance who would then manage the homes for the next two years. If the investors chose to sell at that time, they would get their guaranteed return, and any other profit would go to the company.

Neufeldt recently posted a YouTube video outlining what he believes went wrong. He said he met Thompson and Laflamme in 2014 after a presentation he made to peers.

“It was actually Alisa that came up to me like, ‘Hey, you sound like you’re a smart broker. We need a creative broker to go to the next level,’ ” he recalled.

Neufeldt said the women’s plan seemed to have good intentions, but was short on details.

“They were focused on affordable housing and making sure that people who traditionally couldn’t necessarily get a rental would now have a great home to go to,” he said. “I think they were trying to go for the investors and trying to get people a nice place to live.”

But the women’s business plan, costs and promises to investors didn’t pan out, and the company collapsed at the end of January. He said investors were left wondering where a $10-million investment went.

“The 10 (million dollars) to 20 million (dollars), that’s one thing. The investors that still own the property are in even more of a headache. Now they’ve got properties that in some cases that I know of are definitely overvalued … They’re in undesirable locations and they have less-than-ideal tenants,” he said.

“A lot of these people are provinces away,” he continued. “How are they going to manage a property, like, out in the middle of Saskatoon?”

According to Neufeldt, in late 2021, the Financial Consumer Affairs Authority (FCAA) hit Epic Alliance with a temporary cease trade order. That was lifted a short time later after an independent panel review.

Another FCAA investigation is in progress, along with a court case. None of the allegations against Epic Alliance have been proven in court.