When a business model demands a callous disregard for the well-being of fellow human beings and they become mere cogs in your profit generating wheel, engaging in unethical, immoral, and even illegal behavior becomes nothing more than “good business” in the minds of those steeped in that culture. That attitude is pervasive and contagious. It is reflected in the behavior of everyone associated MiddleTown Property Group, top to bottom.
MiddleTown Property Group appears to employ a purposeful, intentional strategy to deflect, deceive, and delay specifically to manufacture annual resident and employee turnover. Every fall, thousands of new potential victims flood Ball State campus and year after year MiddleTown Property Group continues rolling the dice, hoping none of your victims will ever know enough or care enough to take action to hold you accountable. By all indications, MiddleTown Property Group creates high turnover intentionally to lessen the odds that anyone will do business or remain employed long enough to establish a legally actionable pattern of unlawful behavior and gather the necessary evidence to prove it in court.
Who in their right mind would keep renewing their lease and paying more & more money every month for more & more genuine misery? Who in their right mind would keep working for you, when by most accounts you treat your employees with just as much contempt and callous disregard as you do your residents?
MiddleTown Property Group counts on people’s desire to simply escape and move on with their lives. A member of your staff unintentionally let slip a tell, revealing the cornerstone of MiddleTown Property Group’s approach to resident retention, when she said, “If you’re so miserable there, Alysson, why do you keep renewing your lease?” That statement was made by an “area manager” in response to my complaints that the building I live in was about to enter its third consecutive winter without heat. And she made it just a couple months after news broke about the Attorney General’s investigation in 2023, when MiddleTown Property Group should have been on its best behavior. It’s abundantly clear that MiddleTown Property Group never had any intention of changing its business culture or modifying its behavior.
Those fines from the AG’s office amounted to a small fraction of the revenue generated by MiddleTown Property Group’s business practices. Right? You’ve done the math and you know you’ll always generate more revenue than you’ll be fined. None of you will suffer any personal consequences. No one will face criminal charges, even when you endanger your residents’ health & safety or risk their lives. Right? You know that each time fines are imposed, you can just arbitrarily raise rents, utility fees, and administrative fees to offset the loss, ultimately rebalancing your bottom line. Et voilà! On paper, it’s like it never even happened. That’s a simple calculus, especially when basic human decency and business ethics aren’t part of the equation.
MiddleTown Property Group also knows, based on years of abusing and taking advantage of people, that virtually none of them will take any substantive action to hold you accountable. Even if someone takes you to small claims court, you just won’t show up, a default judgement will be entered against you, and you’ll find another way to offset those losses. Generating revenue and acquiring more properties to monopolize the local market is all MiddleTown Property Group cares about, with no concern or compunction whatsoever about the resulting harm. You don’t care about the psychological toll a toxic culture & a hostile work environment takes on your employees. At some point you recognized manufactured annual turnover is a more profitable business model than resident & employee satisfaction and high retention rates. Right?
I can’t help but wonder…
If you could step back in time and talk to yourselves as Ball State students, what would you say? Would 2015 you be proud or horrified while hearing 2024 you recount MiddleTown Property Group’s past several years?
Surely this isn’t what you set out to become.
The MiddleTown Property Group corporate lore speaks of lofty ambitions to improve the housing market in Muncie to rival that of Bloomington or West Lafayette; yarns spun about two hometown boys who started out buying the house they lived in while attending BSU, then deciding to dedicate themselves to their community, setting out on a noble quest to make Muncie a better place to live.
What happened to those guys? Were those ever really your goals? Or was this always a feckless, callous quest to satisfy your naked ambition and insatiable avarice?
According to MiddleTown Property Group’s origin story, during your years as Ball State students, you continued buying properties on campus. Back in the early days you worked with a property management company, presumably because you had neither the time nor the experience to manage those properties yourselves. You had the capital to acquire them, but you lacked the experience & skill set to manage them. Do I have that right so far? Then, as the story goes, you “outgrew” your property management company and MiddleTown Property Group was born. So… you fired an established, experienced company and started your own from scratch, with no hands-on practical experience. That’s where it all went wrong, gentlemen. You set yourself up for failure from the very start.
As two 20-somethings fresh out of college, you decided to start a property management company with little-to-no professional experience and took on the responsibility of managing a portfolio your own corporate lore describes as more than an established property management could handle. Instead of starting small & keeping things manageable while you learned the ropes and carefully navigated the learning curve, you immediately took on more than you could possibly hope to handle. On top of that, you never stopped acquiring properties.
No matter MiddleTown Property Group’s operational deficits or failures; no matter the pain & misery caused by your unapologetic incompetence, MiddleTown Property Group just pushed on with its aggressive marketing & acquisition strategy. The worse things got on the operations side, the more properties you acquired. On paper, everything looked great. Where the rubber meets the road, MiddleTown Property Group was cutting a path of destruction across Ball State campus & the surrounding community that could rival an F5 tornado.
You always had the capital. You never developed the competence. And at some point, you stopped caring about all the pain & misery you were causing and decided to really lean into your shameless greed.
From the very start, you were destined to end up exactly where you are right now, facing multiple investigations by city, state & federal authorities and inevitable lawsuits, including a class action on behalf of current & former tenants and employees. Since NDAs don’t apply in the context of legal proceedings and law enforcement investigations, I can’t help but wonder what will be uncovered throughout the discovery process. What might current & former employees testify to during the course of a class action lawsuit?
The wheels are really coming off MiddleTown Property Group’s wagon and you’re probably scrambling, scheming, trying to figure out how to weasel your way out of all this. Given MiddleTown Property Group’s established pattern of behavior, I suspect some sort of bankruptcy might be looking pretty good right now. If I were in your shoes, I just might be tempted to engage in some kind of dubious corporate restructuring that could possibly wind up with people facing prison time. That’s a pretty big risk though. I’d probably think it through and ultimately decide against it; choosing instead to just take whatever financial loss was coming my way… that would be better than ending up in prison. Right?
MiddleTown Property Group got away with all this for years. Karma was bound to balance things out at some point. There were moments, many of them and long before this one, when you could have turned things around. One of those moments came less than a year ago, when the Indiana Attorney General announced tens of thousands in fines & restitution following a year-long investigation. I sure hope all the people you were ordered to pay restitution to have received those payments. What MiddleTown Property Group should have done immediately after that investigation was put an indefinite halt on your growth & acquisition strategy and focus 100% of your attention on executing a comprehensive risk mitigation & recovery strategy. That would have been the smart thing to do.
MiddleTown Property Group should have taken out full page ads in newspapers and publications all over the state, sincerely apologizing for the pain & misery you caused and making a genuine commitment to change your corporate culture from top to bottom, taking whatever steps were necessary to make sure you lived up to your publicly-stated mission.
You should have restructured then, separating the for-hire property management into its own division and selling it off to an existing property management company who could actually handle the volume.
You should have taken a serious look at your existing staff and downsized your portfolio to no more than 90% of your current resident-facing operational capacity.
You should have stopped putting 90% of your operating budget into marketing and 10% into resident-facing operations & retention.
You should have course corrected and started anew, committed to finally living up to the MiddleTown Property Group corporate lore.
But none of that happened. And it’s far too late for any of that now.
MiddleTown Property Group’s predatory behavior has become even more egregious since the AG’s office closed its investigation last year. That’s something hundreds, if not thousands, of current and former Ball State University students will attest to in signed affidavits & during depositions throughout the course of a class action lawsuit. Students are returning to Ball State campus now. Classes start next week. How big is the potential victim pool for a class action among returning students? How many more students have moved in just in the past few weeks and already have their own MiddleTown Property Group horror stories to share?
The thing is: none of this had to happen. People love a redemption story. You had more than one chance you write yours. MiddleTown Property Group made a different choice.
MiddleTown Property Group’s business philosophy revolves around deception and dishonesty, while its risk management strategy isn’t so much a strategy as a years-long gamble involving knowingly, wantonly, and maliciously running afoul of the law as standard practice—leaving an auditorium full of victims in your wake—rolling the dice that none of them will have the knowledge, time, or inclination to hold you accountable. MiddleTown Property Group rolled those dice one too many times. It seems your luck has run out. I’m not sure there’s anything you can do to get out from under all this now; probably nothing legal, anyway.
That can’t feel good. You are human, presumably. And yet you continue to prey on and take advantage of your own community. That might be the most mind-boggling part of this whole thing.
I was hoping what happened to so many of your residents around Christmas of 2022 would have snapped MiddleTown Property Group back to reality, forcing you to reflect & reevaluate, not just from a business standpoint, but as human beings. That’s why I chose not to sue you back then. I wanted to give you the opportunity to redeem yourselves. You never did. People were truly harmed, in both moral and legal senses. People are still being harmed; more people now than ever. And no one associated with MiddleTown Property Group seems to care.
How can you not appreciate the gravity of that? How can you not care about the harm & misery you cause?
Your children will one day go off to college. How would you feel if people took advantage of them they way you take advantage of other people’s children?
Your parents will some day be elderly. How would you feel if people preyed on your elderly parents the way you prey on other people’s elderly parents?
When people start talking about holding MiddleTown Property Group accountable, you respond by issuing threats to sell out some New York hedge fund or relocate your operations, robbing Muncie of jobs. I believe I speak for virtually all your residents when I say: “Please do that… do exactly that and the sooner, the better.” Instead of taking responsibility for your failures and acknowledging the real pain & suffering your willful negligence and celebratory incompetence has caused for years, you respond like wannabe mafia thugs trying to intimidate witnesses. MiddleTown Property Group seems to operate more like an organized crime enterprise than a property management company founded by two hometown boys who care about their community.
Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just fix your problems and stop running afoul of the law, creating an endless cycle of investigations & fines, followed by more revenue-generating schemes to rebalance your bottom line?
You could have had a real business by now, rather than an unsustainable shell game destined for a spectacular demise. You could have built a portfolio of habitable, comfortable, sought-after properties and ended up with a waiting list of prospective residents hoping for the opportunity to live in them every fall. You could have had a full staff & a file full of exceedingly qualified prospective employees almost entirely made up of happy residents, plucked from Ball State’s cream of the crop, because not only is it a good job with a great perk of living in a MTPG property, working for a company with a great reputation looks fantastic on a resume.
Wouldn’t that have been great?
You don’t have any of that. You don’t have anything close to that. You have the polar opposite. And you have no one to blame but yourselves.
Are you proud of who you’ve become? How do you sleep at night knowing fines levied against you—fines that were supposed to deter you—ended up being paid by the very people you were fined for preying on? Is that “just good business” to you? Where is your humanity?
There are people at the the other end of the “business decisions” you make and those decisions can & have caused tangible, measurable harm.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to do what it takes to build a company that isn’t perpetually teetering on the brink of disaster and constantly having to come up with new revenue-generation schemes to make payroll or offset fines?
You live here. Your families live here.
Can you still look people in the eye when you’re at Target or out to dinner? Do you ever wonder if the person working the register or bringing your food is one of thousands of people in a private Facebook group sharing their MiddleTown Property Group horror stories?
How many people in your own community—from your own alma mater—have you preyed on over the years? How many more are you knowingly, shamelessly preying on right now?
You not only live among your victims, think of the physical damage that has been and continues being done to the properties you own & manage. The housing market in this city will be dealing with the collateral damage caused by MiddleTown Property Group for decades. You’ve done incalculable harm to people and to property. Your home town and towns all over the state are worse off for MiddleTown Property Group’s existence. This can’t be the reputation you wanted to build. A shameful family legacy can’t be what you wanted your children to inherit.
Do you ever get tired of going deeper & deeper in debt—acquiring new properties you won’t be able to manage, perpetuating this unsustainable cycle of failure, just to keep MiddleTown Property Group looking good on paper—knowing all the while you’re spiraling closer & closer to a complete, irreversible collapse of your entire house of cards?
If your goal was to build a massive real estate portfolio that looked great on paper, then unload the whole mess onto one of those New York hedge funds you periodically threaten to sell out to before it all came crashing down… it seems you may have waited too long. The thing about private equity and international investors is: they always do their due diligence. MiddleTown Property Group created this reality. Until now, the people you’ve preyed on have shouldered the consequences of that reality.
When this is all said & done, will what you’re left with be worth the widespread misery you’ve caused?
There was plenty of profit to be made doing things the right way. And the benefits of an improved work environment for everyone associated with MiddleTown Property Group are incalculable. You don’t have to do things the way you choose to do them to make a lot of money. You could have made a fortune without leaving a wake of misery and destruction behind you. If you thought ending up with buckets of money in exchange for your reputations & integrity and never being able to show your faces in your home town again would be worth it in the end, chances are even that’s probably out the window… now.
Was it worth it?
MiddleTown Property Group didn’t have to destroy itself and become a legendary cautionary tale of celebratory incompetence & insatiable avarice. When you realized you were in over your heads, you doubled down on the quest to satisfy your naked ambition & hoard wealth by buying more properties instead of focusing on managing the ones you already had.
You continued taking on more for-hire property management contracts, even though you knew you couldn’t handle the volume. If MiddleTown Property Group was smart, you’d sell off the for-hire property management division before those lawsuits start rolling in. How none of those property owners have sued you for fraud already is one of life’s great mysteries.
Did it not make more sense to pause your acquisition strategy temporarily while you got a handle on the operations side… instead of having your operations failures not only destroy MiddleTown Property Group’s reputation throughout the state, but your personal reputations in your own home town?
Almost no one will remember that MiddleTown Property Group supposedly started out with lofty ambitions & good intentions. To the few who do, it won’t matter. Too many of their kids and their friends’ kids already have MiddleTown Property Group horror stories and you seem intent on creating new ones every day.
Everything has an opportunity cost. And losses can’t always be measured in dollars. No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy back your reputation. Dane and Derek Wilson, as well as everyone else associated with MiddleTown Property Group, will be remembered as predators who targeted students from your own alma mater and took advantage of innocent, vulnerable members of your own community.
What will be remembered is the damage you did, to people and to property. They’ll remember Ball State students were preyed on, not by some huge, out-of-state real estate conglomerate or face-less private equity firm, but by members of their own community and graduates of their own university. This community will be dealing with damaged & decrepit properties for decades, all because of your insatiable avarice and wanton incompetence. That can’t be how you wanted to be remembered. That can’t be why you started MiddleTown Property Group. This can’t be the reputation you wanted to have in this town and across the state. And it didn’t have to be this way.
If MiddleTown Property Group put half as much effort into improving its resident-facing operations as you do hatching schemes to run afoul of the law for sport & profit and keep residents sprinting for their lives on your revenue-generating hamster wheel, none of this would be happening. Sadly, gaming the system and preying on innocent, vulnerable people seems be part of the pay-off for MiddleTown Property Group. You seem to revel in taking advantage of & bullying people—even your own employees—causing unnecessary misery, and gambling with the future of your company.
Everything on MiddleTown Property Group’s corporate website about its founders being two hometown boys who just want to make Muncie a better place to live is demonstrably untrue. It matters what you do, not what you say. And everything you do goes against that supposed mission. A legacy is built one decision at a time. And the legacy MiddleTown Property Group has built is one of pathological deception, insatiable avarice, and a callous disregard for the well-being of your residents.
This website exists to help MiddleTown Property Group’s victims—your victims—seek justice. There’s only so much the authorities can do through the criminal justice system… probably. I’m sure you’re hoping that turns out to be true. Years of feckless deregulation have dismantled the enforcement infrastructure, so the only real remedy for MiddleTown Property Group’s thousands of victims is to seek restitution through a class action lawsuit; not only in an effort to make them whole, but to deter MiddleTown Property Group from continuing to prey on innocent, unsuspecting, and vulnerable people in the future.
It’s a shame it had to come to this, but you left this community no other choice. Not only did MiddleTown Property Group not modify its practices after the Indiana Attorney General forced you to pay tens of thousands in fines & restitution less than a year ago, your behavior has become even more egregious since. You have thumbed your noses at every effort to get you to modify your behavior and practices, seemingly daring your victims to band together to take collective action to hold you accountable and file suit against you. Well, there’s now a bona fide, organized effort to do just that. And it’s called MiddleTown Property Group Sucks.
GAME ON.
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