A Real Estate Operator Used Colliers' Brand To Sell Retirees Risky Investments. Many Lost Everything
Kevin Long was beaming as he walked down the red carpet at the 2019 New York City Real Estate Expo.
The principal of Millcreek Commercial Properties had flown in from Salt Lake City to give a presentation about his recently rolled out plan to develop $50M worth of single-tenant, triple-net-leased medical office assets across the country. He was on the hunt for investors.
“Our quest, our motto, is to break down the barriers to entry into commercial real estate,” Long told an interviewer at the event. “Our typical investor is 65 years old, and they're just setting their money aside for their retirement and they're living off the income.”
The pitch was one part of the marketing machine built for the Millcreek operation that Long described as “air support with a nuclear arsenal.”
Flyers with the logo of Colliers International, billed as Millcreek’s exclusive agent, bombarded the mailboxes of investors — many of them retirees looking to capitalize on passive income through 1031 exchanges — while recruiters made phone calls.
The pitch: a high-return investment in newly developed or recently renovated buildings, already leased to rapidly growing tenants.
The problem: Those tenants were failing, and the investments turned sour.
Long, Millcreek and Colliers International have been sued more than a dozen times over the deals, in which investors bought interests in medical office properties marketed as passive-income investments backed by creditworthy tenants. At least three tenants have filed for bankruptcy, and investors claim they have been left with assets worth millions less than they paid. State and federal regulators are investigating, Bisnow has learned.
Michael Theologos, a 69-year-old single father of two sons, invested $1.5M split between two properties in Bluffdale, Utah, and Naperville, Illinois. He expected to live a comfortable retirement and raise his children in his home country of Greece, in part thanks to a steady stream of rent payments coming from the properties’ tenants.
Instead, he lost almost everything. Twice a year, he struggles to scrape together the money to pay for the flight to New York to treat his youngest son’s cancerous eye tumor. He wishes he could afford to move closer to his son’s medical team in the U.S.
“It totally destroyed me,” Theologos said of the investment. “Now I’m suffering, and not only that, I have two kids that suffer. I don’t have enough to provide for them.”
Theologos’ story is one of many from Millcreek investors who say they were lured into purchasing properties with promises of hassle-free income. Theologos can’t afford to join one of the 14 lawsuits in five states that have been brought by dozens of investors against Colliers, Millcreek, Long and a host of others.
The suits, filed between June 2023 and February 2026, allege Long and his partners scammed investors out of millions of dollars by selling them ownership stakes, known as tenants-in-common shares, in medical properties. Investors claim they were misled by wildly inflated property values that hinged on leases signed by tenants that never actually moved in or paid their promised, above-market rents.
“We’re alleging in our three different lawsuits that the same network of defendants — operating under Colliers' brand — engaged in a plan to strip mostly, but not just, retirees out of their life savings,” said Rachel Dardashti, a principal at Beverly Hills, California-based Reif Law Group representing 12 clients who together invested in seven Millcreek-related properties.
“They manufactured trust, and then they exploited it,” she added.
As the medical companies that leased space in the buildings went bankrupt and the business began to unravel, Millcreek scrambled to calm anxious investors, according to court filings.
“He is nervous because of our cash flow issues,” Long allegedly wrote in an email to Millcreek Chief Financial Officer Brent Smith in 2023 after an interaction with a property manager.
“I would be. We do not have the money to pay him. I will talk him through it — I hope :)” Long said to close the email, submitted as evidence in an ongoing civil suit.
Long declined to respond to a detailed list of questions.
It is unclear if Colliers, a $5.3B company with more than 24,000 employees, was involved or aware that Millcreek was using its brand to market risky investments to retirees. Colliers has filed motions to dismiss in several of the cases, arguing that it didn't have a contract with Millcreek.
A Colliers spokesperson declined to provide a statement or respond to a detailed list of questions, citing its policy against commenting on active litigation.
Smith, who is a defendant in at least seven cases, denied the allegations raised in lawsuits through a statement provided by his attorney.
“Although the purchase of commercial real estate always comes with risk, the majority of properties sold by Millrock have provided positive returns to the Tenant-in-Common purchasers,” Smith's attorney, Anthony Durone, said in a statement.
Millrock Financial is the holding company Long and Smith established to purchase the properties and sell the TIC interests.
The cases have spurred investigations by regulators and prosecutors. The Securities and Exchange Commission has contacted at least one investor for an interview this year, indicating that an investigation may be in its initial stages, according to correspondence reviewed by Bisnow. The federal agency declined to comment.
The Division of Real Estate at the Utah Department of Commerce has accused Long of committing nine violations of Utah administrative rules, according to a petition based on its investigation.
Long withheld information about a tenant not being able to pay rent while selling more TIC shares in October 2023, the Department of Commerce said in the petition. A disciplinary hearing is scheduled for October, although Long could settle before then, a department spokesperson said.
Two of the 14 lawsuits have been settled, but most were slogging along in court as of late April. Long and other defendants have been trying to dismiss the cases before they reach the trial phase.
Long’s attorneys have claimed that the plaintiffs haven't provided sufficient evidence to back their allegations, which include breach of contract, unjust enrichment and negligence, and that the statute of limitations for private investors to sue has expired.
Discovery is underway in at least two suits.
'Adult Supervision'
Long was a political consultant before he says he was recruited into the brokerage world in 1998 by venture capitalist and Skinwalker Ranch owner Brandon Fugal. By 2013, Long was the principal broker and chief operating officer of CBC Advisors, a firm backed by Fugal that grew to 30 offices before being acquired in 2018 by Toronto-based brokerage giant Colliers International.
Lew Cramer, who served as CEO of CBC, now runs Colliers’ operations in Utah alongside Fugal.
Long left Colliers shortly after the merger to establish Millcreek with Smith. In September 2020, Long sent a memorandum of understanding to Cramer that outlined a business partnership between the brokerage and Millcreek.
The agreement — submitted as evidence in a lawsuit regarding investments in a property in South Jordan, Utah — estimated that Millcreek would run $100M worth of transactions through Colliers annually as its exclusive agent. It also established a mentoring program run by Long, with assistance from his son and Cramer, which would train junior brokers to support the Colliers team.
The MOU states that Millcreek’s operations would be separate from the Colliers business but that the brokerage would lend its name and expertise to all marketing material, “including the development of due diligence packages.” Colliers agents would earn a 4% commission on sales of TIC interests in Millcreek properties. It isn’t clear if the MOU was ever ratified.
Millcreek agent Scott Rutherford described a much closer partnership to potential clients during a presentation in July 2020, saying Millcreek was operating “under the umbrella of Colliers International.”
“Kevin coined the phrase for Millcreek: ‘TICs with adult supervision,’” Rutherford said at the time, describing the partial interests in properties they were selling. “We’ve got oversight by Colliers International.”
In an October 2020 podcast interview, Long claimed that he and his partners would take the risk if the properties were to fail while assuring investors that they would never want to offload their stakes.
The investors Millcreek targeted were typically landlords who would sell their existing investment property and transfer those funds to Millcreek through a 1031 exchange. They were sold on the promise of trading the labor of repainting bedrooms for the relaxation of sipping piña coladas and collecting checks.
“We change hassles for happiness,” Long said on the podcast. “We have a lot of people who sell their single-family rentals for a 4.5 [capitalization rate] and invest with us in a six cap, take that 50% return increase and take off to Hawaii. Because the only thing they have to do is make sure the check lands in their account.”
Investors Roped In
Bryson Ockey invested $850K in a project in Lehi, Utah, in late 2022 through a 1031 exchange after selling a four-unit rental property that had been in his family for three generations. He was tired of the upkeep, wanted to spend more time with his wife and children, and was lured in by the promise of an investment trade that avoided a tax hit.
The promised regular payments from the property stopped arriving roughly a year after he invested, said Ockey, one of the investors suing Long, Millcreek and Colliers.
“It was debilitating, actually,” the 55-year-old Utah resident said. “I ran through every emotion, from suicidal to outright anger to blaming myself, victim blaming. Then, finally, it’s embarrassing. How did I get taken? How did this happen to me? I’m smarter than this.”
Jim Tucker, an experienced real estate investor, was exploring 1031 exchange options when he came across a TIC investment opportunity for the medical office building in South Jordan being marketed by Colliers and Millcreek.
He was initially skeptical. Millcreek's flyer advertised cap rates higher than anything else he could find on the market.
Marketing materials filed in Utah federal court advertised the 13K SF property as having two tenants in its four suites and a signed lease with Neuragenex, a startup also known as NGX that marketing materials called the “nation’s fastest growing healthcare brand.”
NGX’s lease seemed “poorly written, incomplete and internally inconsistent,” Tucker said.
He was about to walk away from the deal when Long sent him an email, admitting to coming across as “sloppy and unprofessional.”
Long offered a contract promising that a Millcreek entity would guarantee NGX’s rent payments until the tenant moved in, according to a copy of the email filed with the lawsuit.
Tucker said his due diligence showed that Millcreek had $18M in assets, more than enough to cover his scheduled payments, which reassured him. In early 2023, Tucker purchased a 12.4% stake in the $10.3M property, sharing it with 16 other investors.
One of his co-owners was Liz Carlston, who was looking to convert a residential investment property into a more passive source of income. The income would help support her family, including a son with special needs.
She also had reservations until a sales agent mentioned that one of the Millcreek principals was Spencer Taylor. The name instantly rang a bell for Carlston.
“We went to Columbine High School together,” she said.
She was a student there in 1999 when the Littleton, Colorado, school became the site of one of the most notorious mass shootings in U.S. history that left 14 people dead, including Carlston’s basketball coach, plus the two shooters.
“We learned how to run during the shooting. That was our junior year,” Carlston said.
“So I know Spencer because of that trauma,” she said. “You just kind of go through something crappy like that together, [I thought,] ‘Yeah, Spencer is a good guy.’”
She invested $300K in March 2023, which the sales agent said would net her a $1,600 check every month.
Problematic Partners
Long had tapped a cast of business partners with past legal entanglements to stand up the Millcreek operation, which included new developments and the acquisition of existing properties to be flipped to TIC investors.
Millcreek partnered with American Development Partners, led by Emanuele “Manny” Butera, and Steve Caton’s SARC Entities for construction and renovation at many of the 13 properties that appear in the lawsuits.
In at least one case, SARC helped facilitate Millcreek’s acquisition of a property. SARC paid $1.1M in May 2021 to acquire a 1988-built, 3,516 SF medical office building in Kennesaw, Georgia, according to deed records.
In March 2022, SARC sold the property to an entity connected to Millcreek for $4.7M. The next day, ownership was transferred to a group of TIC investors for $5.5M.
The TIC owners eventually listed the property for sale as a brand-new, “never occupied” medical office. It sold in July 2024 for $1.4M, according to deed records.
A lawsuit brought by investors in Georgia, Illinois and Texas properties says a Millcreek fund paid the firms run by Butera and Caton more than $12M, “all of which has disappeared,” and left the mostly elderly and retired investors with titles to properties that were “unfinished, over-priced,” and burdened by taxes and fees.
Caton declined to respond to specific questions, citing ongoing litigation, but said that neither he nor SARC is connected to the “alleged conduct of other parties referenced in these matters.”
“I want to reiterate that the allegations referenced in these lawsuits are unproven claims, and both SARC and I strongly deny any wrongdoing,” Caton said in an email. “We are confident that the facts will come out through the legal process.”
Butera, who at one point was the largest owner of World Gym franchises, has been sued before over similar allegations, including intentionally inflating revenue projections. His gym holdings fell apart after his investors pulled out and filed for bankruptcy in 2007.
He pleaded guilty to bankruptcy fraud in 2011, admitting he had withdrawn cash from his struggling fitness business — cash that ended up buried in his father-in-law's Mississippi backyard. He was sentenced to three months in prison.
Butera then started a career in restaurant franchising. That ended in 2022 with a lawsuit accusing Butera of racketeering and promising overinflated returns on leases to entice investors while also guaranteeing low rents to the franchise operators. That case was remanded to state court in 2023 after RICO was found to be inapplicable, and the case was ultimately dismissed following a settlement agreement.
Butera didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Rutherford, the Millcreek agent who gave the 2020 presentation, was among a group charged by the Department of Justice in August 2023 for allegedly defrauding investors out of $30M. Rutherford convinced investors, many of whom were elderly, to buy TIC interests in venue chain Noah Event Centers and then misappropriated funds to pay large commissions, run operations and return capital to prior investors, prosecutors said.
In the case unrelated to Millcreek, Rutherford pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in June and is scheduled for sentencing in October.
Rutherford declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
Tenant Lineup
Millcreek's healthcare properties were marketed to investors as being anchored by the “tenant of your dreams,” brought in by Butera and Caton and thoroughly vetted by a Colliers team of analysts, according to marketing materials filed in court.
In sales pitches, the Millcreek team said it expected explosive growth from its tenants and told investors the deals included protections against default.
But between September 2023 and June 2024, three major tenants in Millcreek properties went bankrupt.
Healthcare Solutions Holdings, a subsidiary of Healthcare Solutions Management Group, was the first, signing on to occupy at least eight Millcreek properties.
Long’s team marketed returns between 6% and 9% at properties anchored by HSH. If anything were to go wrong, the startup’s parent company would act as a corporate guarantor for the lease, Millcreek’s agents told investors.
But the company imploded. Creditors, including Millrock Investment Fund 1 — the holding company for Millcreek's TIC properties — filed an involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition against Healthcare Solutions Management Group in September 2023. The SEC charged HSH executives in 2024 with defrauding investors of at least $2.7M. Settlement discussions are ongoing in that case.
After HSH, Butera and Caton brought in Neuragenex with an even more ambitious plan. NGX and Butera’s American Development Partners entered into a deal for the chain of chronic-pain relief clinics to open 500 locations over 10 years with a capital commitment of $1.5B, according to NGX’s bankruptcy filing.
The agreement required that NGX sign on to every “Qualified Project” presented by Butera and Caton, and leases were frequently signed before properties were ready for occupancy, according to bankruptcy filings.
An Oct. 3, 2023, blog post on Millcreek’s website claimed that Neuragenex was already operating 12 locations nationwide and would expand to 56 locations — many in Millcreek properties — within the next year.
But trouble was already brewing. That same month, NGX asked Millcreek for “cash flow relief” and said it was likely to be late on rent at two locations, court records show.
Long told investors in the Bluffdale and Lehi properties that the “NGX developers” said they were optimistic they would collect the rent within three months, according to an Oct. 19, 2023, email obtained by Bisnow. Millcreek’s property manager had a different perspective.
“There is no chance that rent will magically appear before we make distributions to TIC owners,” Green Ivy, the management firm, wrote in an email to Millcreek employees that was forwarded to Long later in October. “We are faced with having to distribute a very small amount of rents between a lot of owners.”
Millcreek used at least $110K of its own funds to cover NGX rental payments at the South Jordan property between December 2023 and January 2024, according to a log of rent payments provided to TIC investors by Green Ivy and filed in Utah federal court.
Green Ivy, a Salt Lake City-based property management firm that is a defendant in at least three Millcreek-related cases, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. In motions to dismiss, attorneys for the company wrote that Green Ivy was uninvolved in marketing the investments.
NGX filed for bankruptcy in January 2024 after signing what it described in the filing as leases with base rent that was “incomprehensible, but, appears to be based on the aggregate amount spent by the landlord to acquire and develop each property,” plus the fees to be paid to Butera's American Development Partners. An independent expert cited in the filings placed the rents at three to five times higher than market rates.
In legal filings, Millcreek said it invested more than $100M to build out and equip NGX locations and accused the firm of cutting a secret rebate deal with suppliers where NGX received half of the payments it invoiced Millcreek for.
When Caton’s SARC filed for bankruptcy in June 2024, its largest unsecured claim included a $673K equipment lease with NGX.
In some locations, HSH and Neuragenex were replaced by Pulse Healthcare — and the cycle repeated for a third time.
Pulse missed rent on its location in Crockett, Texas, in October 2023, which Millcreek attributed to the sudden death of Pulse’s chief financial officer. Later, it blamed Pulse’s billing systems.
In a Nov. 15, 2023, email, Long acknowledged that Pulse’s principal “has not followed through on his plans to open the surgery center.” But the Crockett location was still being marketed by Millcreek to investors as late as March 2024.
Pulse filed for bankruptcy in June 2024.
TIC investors had bought into the Crockett property at a $9.5M valuation. Following Pulse’s default, a broker opinion of value estimated it was worth roughly $2M, according to legal filings.
The Breakdown
The marketing materials and stories told by investors about what they were promised differ from what TIC investments typically look like, according to Carey Heyman, managing principal at CLA, an accounting and advisory firm.
TIC investments can have shared property managers and accounting firms, but owners must keep track of their own finances, decisions about the property must be made unanimously, and owners interested in selling their stakes are responsible for finding buyers.
“Everything is completely separate,” Heyman said.
The Millcreek investors who have filed lawsuits allege they were never consulted on decisions. Several said they were provided inaccurate data on lease agreements, financial projections and tenant payment histories. The suits say Millcreek subsidized millions of dollars of medical equipment on behalf of tenants without telling investors.
Tucker, who invested $1.25M, said the offering memorandum he was presented for his South Jordan property included a tenant that hadn’t yet moved in.
“The rent coming in on that space, on that building, was about less than a third of what they were showing, because they were showing it as if Neuragenex was already in the building,” he said. “They were not.”
Matt Chancey, a certified financial planner, said the losses Millcreek’s investors took aren’t entirely uncommon. Everyday investors often fail to do the necessary due diligence or miss the finer points of a contract and are particularly susceptible to faulty sales pitches.
“It's so disingenuous, the way it's positioned to the client, playing on the client’s hubris and overconfidence and the fact that they have accumulated some wealth,” Chancey said based on his review of the Millcreek pitches. “It's pretty slimy.”
After lawsuits surrounding Millcreek were flagged to Chancey by Bisnow, he realized that he, too, had been on the company’s marketing list.
Theologos, the Greek investor who in 2021 bought stakes in medical offices in Naperville and Bluffdale, first became suspicious in 2023 when HSH, the tenant slated to move into both properties, filed for bankruptcy. Investors in the Naperville property filed a federal lawsuit against Millcreek that June, marking the start of the breakdown.
The South Jordan investors received their expected monthly payments through the end of 2023, but the distributions dropped substantially in early 2024, when Green Ivy notified them by email that NGX had filed for bankruptcy. Since NGX would not be paying rent, total monthly rent collections would plunge from $57K to $12K, Green Ivy told the investors.
Investors in the Lehi property had also stopped receiving distributions by then, Ockey said.
As more properties lost their prospective tenants, Long and other Millcreek principals rushed to find replacements and calm investors’ nerves.
“Then come the Zoom calls,” Ockey said, explaining how the Millcreek team would consistently offer promises on a path forward. “‘They defaulted on this, but we're working our way through this. Don't worry.’”
After months of attempted reassurances, Carlston and other South Jordan investors started looking into Millcreek and eventually discovered that it had known about NGX’s restructuring plans since October 2023, according to emails reviewed by Utah Department of Commerce investigators. The startup never paid rent or occupied the building, according to the Utah petition.
The 17 South Jordan investors cut Millcreek and Long out of their communications, and Tucker “yelled and screamed” until the group agreed to sue, he said. They filed a federal civil suit in October 2024. By then, they were the eighth investor or group to take Long and Millcreek to court over similar deals, a Bisnow review of court records found.
Durone, the attorney for Millcreek CFO Brent Smith, attributed the scrapped leases to the pandemic.
“Unfortunately, during the COVID pandemic, tenants who had executed and guaranteed long term leases in certain properties did not follow through on their commitments which resulted in lower cash flows than the Tenants in Common anticipated or hoped for,” Durone said in a statement to Bisnow. “Like the plaintiffs, Millrock too has not received rent payments from these tenants.”
Smith and Millrock, the holding company for Millcreek's TIC investments, are still trying to find new tenants and buyers for some of the medical offices “where possible,” Durone said.
That includes trying to fill spaces themselves. At the end of 2024, Long's group had lined up a new tenant named NextPain to take the Lehi space after the NGX bankruptcy.
Its chief financial officer was Smith. NextPain ceased operations in May 2025 before ever moving into the Lehi property.
By then, Ockey had sold his shares to the other investors in the building for around 22 cents on the dollar and joined a civil suit against Colliers, Long, Millcreek and others.
“They spun a good web, all the promises,” Ockey said.
As more and more investors began to question the promised returns that weren’t being delivered, Long took their side at one point, joining in on a lawsuit against HSH.
Emails sent at the time and later submitted as evidence reveal he was feeling boxed in by investors.
“To keep the two ownership groups (Keller, TX and Draper, UT) from suing us we need to cooperate with them in a suit against HSH,” Long wrote in an email to Butera and Smith in 2023. “To keep the owners from turning into an angry mob Millcreek is paying rent beginning this month - ouch.”
'Devastating' Losses
Millcreek is no longer operational. A Dec. 3, 2024, post on its website directed clients to “our friends at KGL Advisors.”
KGL’s website advertises “hassle-free monthly passive income.” Long is listed as the company’s president.
Long's business philosophy grew out of his upbringing on a small farm, he told Utah Business in 2016 when he was honored that year as a motivational C-suite leader. He talked of serving the community with his team of 450 commercial real estate brokers.
“There’s a causal relationship between reward and doing what’s right,” Long said at the time. “I can see people make bad decisions, selfish decisions, and see how it affects them six months later.”
Long continued to present himself as an ally to his investors, even as the buildings he sold them hemorrhaged value. After receiving an angry email from a TIC investor in May 2024, Long responded around midnight, asking that the investor and his wife pray for him and Smith.
“Over the past 7 months Brent and I have invested extensive financial, emotional and relationship capital on your behalf. When you and the other owners were abandoned by your tenant we came to your side and reached out a helping hand,” he wrote. “On nights like tonight, late at my desk responding to this email and reflecting on our other communication, I feel like that hand is being bitten off.”
Ockey lost more than $660K on his TIC investment, a total he called “devastating.”
Theologos lost more than $1M on his investment in Millcreek's building in Bluffdale. He has talked to lawyers about filing or joining a civil case but said he can’t afford to pay the six-figure retainer they have requested.
He is considering spending the cash he has left to move to New York City for his son’s cancer treatment, but he doubts he could find a place he could afford. After a long career in commercial real estate investment, he said he would be happy to work as a taxi driver.
Looking back, he regrets not doing more due diligence before making the investment.
“I saw the cheese, but I never saw the trap,” he said.
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