The leak began in Talesha Weaver’s bathroom in August 2018. Then it spread to the dining room, the hallway and the kitchen of the downstairs apartment she rented in the house on East 135th Street.
Within months, the wall next to the shower was buckling. Water dripped into the kitchen cabinets. It shorted out light fixtures, she said. Part of her kitchen ceiling gave way under the moisture. She tried to stay out of the apartment except to sleep.
After she moved in, a property manager came by to collect her rent in cash, Weaver said. But one day, he told her that he didn’t have the property anymore. He couldn’t say who did, she recalled.
What Weaver didn’t know was that her landlord was thousands of miles away in Sweden. Her leaky house was part of a transatlantic chain of investments, disappointments and disputes that stretched from Lake Erie to the Baltic Sea.
The Swedish network of property investments involved at least 80 buyers, 100 Cleveland-area houses and a now-bankrupt real estate firm based in Stockholm, a Signal Cleveland review of property records, business filings and emails found. The Swedish investors bought the houses between 2016 and 2019, largely on the East Side.
Neighbors complained about one house that became a target for a police drug raid. Two homes burned down. Others were boarded up at public expense, and the city flagged at least one for lead paint hazards, records show.
Some investors say the Swedish real estate company misled them into money-losing bets on badly maintained properties. The investors’ story came to the attention of Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, which reported on the ground in Northeast Ohio with Signal Cleveland.
This year, city leaders rewrote Cleveland’s housing laws, hoping to end a years-long struggle to make out-of-town investors answer for their local rentals.
“It’s hard to hold people in Europe accountable for the conditions of homes here in Cleveland,” Mayor Justin Bibb said in his most recent State of the City speech.
‘There is no reason why I should have to live in these conditions’
At her mother’s suggestion, Weaver began paying her $575 rent into escrow at Cleveland Housing Court. The court would hold her money until the landlord made repairs.
“There is no reason why I should have to live in these conditions when my rent is being paid on time every month,” Weaver wrote in a court filing.
Weaver, now 34, worked overnight as a security guard at a downtown office building. In the mornings after her shift, she went to the Justice Center to see a housing court specialist, she said. For a week, the specialist tracked down answers to what shouldn’t have been questions at all: Who owned Weaver’s house? Who managed it?
The landlord didn’t respond to Weaver’s complaint, and the case went nowhere. The court gave her relocation money and part of her rent back, and she moved to the eastern suburbs.
“When I moved out, I left the keys in the mailbox,” she said. “You don’t have a person to call and say, ‘I moved all my things out.’”
Investors sold on ‘security on solid ground’ in America
The 2008 foreclosure crisis turned cities such as Cleveland and Detroit into tempting opportunities for investors. Property values plummeted, and many houses were left to decay. An investor could buy a house cheap, rent it out or sell it for more.
About a decade later, a Swedish businesswoman named Kajsa Sihlén jumped into the Midwest real estate market. Through her company, Solid Capital Group, she marketed houses to other Swedish investors.
In one YouTube video marketing opportunities to invest in Detroit, slow-motion footage showed Sihlén presenting to rooms of people as staff poured what looked to be champagne. She stood before the projected image of a house. Above the picture was a caption: “Från ratt-race till finansiell frihet.” “From rat race to financial freedom.”
On its now-defunct website, Solid Capital Group advertised a 15.8% return on investment. A house bought at $39,500 could generate a net rental income of $6,256 annually after taxes, insurance and payments for Solid’s property manager, the website said.
The site warned about risks. The tenants might not pay. Maintenance costs might be higher than expected. Natural disasters might damage the property. Even so, the site said there had “never been a better time” to buy Ohio real estate.
“Security on solid ground,” an archived version of the site said in 2017. “Think secure savings. Do you want to secure a pension, create a buffer and free up time?”
Years later, several investors sued. They alleged that Solid sold them on promises of refurbished houses and healthy returns that turned out to be false.
“The property manager could not handle the large number of houses,” the investors’ complaint read, “so many houses were empty and in poor condition without any renovations, which in turn gave rise to vandalism and burglary.”
By 2023, Solid Capital Group was bankrupt, frustrating the investors’ effort to win back money in the Swedish courts. A separate suit against Sihlén settled last year without a finding of liability or a payout to either party.
Sihlén declined a request for an interview. “I prefer not to revisit past legal matters,” she wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland.
More than 100 Cleveland properties linked to Sweden
Solid Capital Group did not own the houses it was selling. Instead, it acted as a marketer for properties owned by SBAR Holdings LLC, a real estate company run by a U.S.-based entrepreneur named Andreas Johansson.
Johansson sold real estate around the country to investment funds. He helped launch basketball star Dennis Rodman’s vodka brand. He is part owner of a minor league hockey team in upstate New York.
Initially, he sold a few properties to Sihlén and a colleague of hers, he recalled to Signal Cleveland. SBAR Holdings started picking up more houses across the East Side – from Slavic Village and Union Miles to Glenville and East Cleveland – and sold them to Solid Capital Group’s clients.
The company paid $2.7 million for 160 Cleveland-area properties, a Signal Cleveland analysis of transaction records found. It sold more than 150 properties for $8 million – an increase of around $5.3 million. More than 100 of those houses went to the Swedish network of investors, property transactions, business records and emails indicate.
Johansson said he didn’t walk away with $5 million, though. He told Signal Cleveland much of that money was eaten up by costs – repairs, investors’ utility bills and Solid Capital Group’s cut for finding the buyers, for instance. Johansson shared what he said was a breakdown of his expenses that left him with a profit of just shy of $413,000 from the Swedish deals, before additional expenses such as travel.
Touch or click on a property on the map above for more information each property.
Sihlén offered prospective investors tours of Cleveland and Detroit. Occasionally, Johansson would join them, he said. He recalled meeting a group of them in Cleveland. Some appeared to be sophisticated investors, but others were not, he said.
“They couldn’t understand that investments might work out, but it also could go wrong,” Johansson said.
Some investors seemed to be driven by a belief that, as Johansson put it, “to have success in life, you have to create passive income and you have to invest and make money while you’re sleeping.”
Although investors took Solid Capital Group to court in Sweden over the soured venture, Johansson said they should have known the risks of buying property overseas.
If the houses were meant to be hands-off investments for the Swedes, someone in Cleveland had to do the work of maintaining them. Early on, maintenance responsibilities for dozens of Swedish-owned rentals fell to Bradley Kessler, a local property manager who worked with Johansson and Solid Capital Group. Kessler said he also helped locate the homes sold to investors and carried out planned renovations.
His address served as the mailbox for many Swedish LLCs, including the one that owned Talesha Weaver’s leaky apartment. After what he described as a couple of years full of 90-hour work weeks, Kessler quit working on the Swedish houses, he told Signal Cleveland. Other property managers took over.
Kessler said that he knew “people were losing money,” but argued that the investors themselves bore responsibility for taking on the risk.
“This is a Swedish problem,” he said. “This is not an American problem.”
A Swedish house vexes neighbors
Marie Hine, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, lives next to a house that has seen two Swedish owners come and go. She has lived on Dorver Avenue in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood on and off since 1962.
Hine didn’t know that the house at 7901 Dorver had belonged to Swedish investors, but she knew it had been a problem. It attracted noise and traffic that used to keep her up. She and her neighbors complained to everyone they could – the police, City Council, the mayor’s office.
“It was just horrible,” she said. “We couldn’t sleep at night. There were cars, they’d come and blow the horn in the middle of the night.”
On a September morning in 2017, Hine was cleaning her home when a line of unmarked police cars and vans arrived on the street to search the house next door for drugs. Inside, officers found a bag of fentanyl and heroin, digital scales dusted in white powder and multiple guns.
The landlord in Sweden ought to have known what was happening at his house, Hine said. Whether he did or not isn’t clear. Within a year, he sold the house to another Swede, a school teacher in Gothenburg.
Hine has six dogs, including a teacup yorkie named Spicy, who joins her on the porch while her great-grandkids play beneath tinkling wind chimes. More than a century ago, newspaper advertisements painted Dorver as a financial refuge for families looking to own their own homes. Now, her great-grandchildren run up and down a street where vacant lots have taken the place of at least 20 houses.
Hine knows firsthand about out-of-town investors. She used to own a second house across the street. By 2022, she felt she could no longer keep up with the demands of being a landlord and the late-night calls about leaky faucets. Her daughter helped her find a real estate agent, who sold it to a California-based LLC. That owner has already resold the house.
“This is happening all over Cleveland,” Hine said recently, “and it’s not just Swedish people, either.”
Hine said she has no plans to sell her own home, however. She said she has “one move left,” pointing toward the ground as if to her future grave. That doesn’t stop potential buyers from making offers.
“I get probably, I’ll say, 50 pieces of mail a month asking to buy the house,” Hine said. “I just tear it up and throw it in the garbage.”
Signal Cleveland’s April Urban analyzed property transaction and other public records for this story.
An earlier version of the headline misstated the unit of measurement in the distance between Cleveland and Sweden. They are 6,000 kilometers apart, not miles. The equivalent distance is roughly 4,000 miles.
