Meet Brad Sumrok: The greedy ‘Apartment King’ owner of 7,700 rental properties –

Brad Sumrok, aka the ‘Apartment King’, is all tan, smiles, and white teeth as he launches into a typical sales pitch.

At one of his glitzy networking events in Dallas, he claims to have ‘created over 600 millionaires’ by coaching everyone from doctors to warehouse workers in how to invest in commercial real estate.

Never, he adds, has he ‘lost anyone’s money’.

Sumrok, a 57-year-old salesman from Texas, has been credited with driving the business known as apartment syndication to new heights, creating a generation of landlords who now own tens of thousands of apartment buildings worth billions of dollars.

He and his ilk have been blamed for driving property prices out of reach of first time buyers. But now his bubble may be about to burst.

Amid soaring interest rates, some of his students have overstretched themselves and cannot afford the massive loans they took out to finance their spending sprees.

Millions of dollars of investors’ money has already been lost after buildings bought by Sumrok disciples fell into foreclosure.

The Wall Street Journal described one particularly egregious blowup as one of the largest commercial real estate disasters since the 2008 financial crash.

Meanwhile, one syndication expert told DailyMail.com that up to $50billion tied up in such deals is at risk of being lost.

Sumrok, a man who likes to dance on stage to Calvin Harris to the acclaim of adoring fans, is now facing the music for having a thirst for cash as big as his grin.

For his part, he has stressed that he fully informed students of the risks of investment. 

And while there’s no suggestion of wrongdoing, Sumrok’s ethics have continued to raise eyebrows.  

So, DailyMail.com asks, is he the real deal property guru that he purports to be, or, as one disgruntled student put it, no more than a ‘cheesy used-car salesman’? 

The making of ‘The Apartment King’ 

Sumrok sells the American Dream. He regales followers of his humble beginnings as a middle-of-the-road salesman after securing an MBA from the University of Houston in the late 90s.

He got fired, considered law school, but changed his mind when he went to a real estate conference.

He never looked back. 

In 2002, Sumrok closed his first deal, before ‘retiring’ from his day job three years later.

In 2013, he started his mentorship program.

Now he teaches wannabe property moguls how to pool their cash and buy up apartment buildings they otherwise could not afford.

To do so, Sumrok tells them to take out loans and raise money from other investors.

They can then turn this into a personal fortune by making cosmetic repairs and raising rents as high as they can.

His Foundations program costs $8,000 for 18 training modules and a few networking events.

Personal mentoring with one of his handpicked coaches costs around $30,000, while one-on-one coaching with the guru himself is said to be up to $100,000.

Sumrok has said his target audience is ‘six-figure income earners’, budding investors with enough capital to get started on deals and pay for his programs.

The networking events play another crucial function. Regulations mean syndicators can only raise money for deals from accredited investors, unless they can demonstrate they have built a substantial relationship with them beforehand.

Sumrok’s gatherings help his followers build those relationships, expanding their pool of potential partners.

As such, they attract many with no real estate experience.

In the early days, his students would meet in the lobby of his Dallas apartment building before jumping on bus tours of nearby properties.

Afterwards, they would gather for beer and pizza, concocting ways to pool their resources to buy up the homes they had just seen.

Now, they are cult-like experiences.

At one of his ‘Rat Race 2 Retirement’ events in November 2021, Sumrok invited hundreds of followers to join in an incantation – a call-and-response.

‘I am a millionaire investor,’ he bellowed, lifting his fist and cinematic music…