The unfinished Indiana site wasn’t the only casualty.
Jay Gregory, the host of an Outdoor Channel show about bow hunting, said he put $1 million into a rental venue in Chesapeake, Virginia. He was one of 16 investors recruited by Rockwell to pay a combined $5.8 million in 2015 to build a facility, with Noah would be the primary user of the space, he said.
Promised Returns
Investment in the property was managed by Rockwell, which promised returns starting at 7% a year and claimed they would reach almost 11% after 20 years, Gregory said. After several years of steady checks, he’s getting nothing now.
“This has just turned into a nightmare,’’ Gregory, who isn’t involved in the litigation, said in an interview. He has sold other assets to make up for the monthly income he no longer collects from the property. “If I’d known this was going to happen I would have just taken my million and invested it in the stock market.’’
Bill Rickett, a Texas retiree, said he invested $1.2 million in a site in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 2015. Rickett said he’d been steered to Rockwell by a 1031 expert, but only agreed to invest after meeting Bowser in person at one of the company’s sites in Las Calinas, Texas.
Rickett said he liked what he saw, and that Rockwell’s growth strategy seemed to make sense, so he agreed to join more than a dozen others who invested a combined $6.2 million to build the Michigan venue. But in March, Noah stopped paying rent, which Rickett found baffling, because the building was regularly booking events.
“There’s a lot bitterness,” Rickett said.
This story provided by Bloomberg News.