What Happened to Tides Equities? 8 Lender Takeovers, $51.1M in Paid Judgments and a Form D Gap

What Tides Equities was, in its own words and on EDGAR

Tides Equities is the Los Angeles firm behind dozens of apartment complexes renamed “Tides on” or “Tides at” something. Ryan Andrade is described as “Co-Founder and Principal, Tides Equities” in a March 1, 2022 CIM Group press release; Sean Kia signs Tides' SEC filings. In that release, announcing a $255 million joint purchase with CIM Group of the 1,012-unit Del Mar Terrace in Phoenix (renamed The Tides on 71st), Tides said it was its 57th acquisition in greater Phoenix and its 107th in the Western states since 2016. That is the company's own count.

The model was the classic value-add syndication: raise equity from individual investors in a separate LLC for each property, borrow most of the price with a floating-rate bridge loan, renovate units and raise rents. The loan documents in the court files show what came with the debt: interest-rate cap agreements, renovation budgets, “carry” guaranties covering interest and reserves, and recourse guaranties signed personally by Kia and Andrade.

What the public record does not show is the 2020-2022 investor raise. Tides-managed issuers filed Form D notices for property-level LLCs from 2017 to 2019, and then the trail on EDGAR stops.

Totals are our sum; investor counts are positions, not unique people. Every filing claims Rule 506(b), reports no sales commissions, and none was ever amended. The South Tempe feeder is the outlier: it was filed from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, names Tides at South Tempe Manager, LLC as its manager, and accounts for a third of the dollars on this list.

How we looked for later filings: we searched every SEC Form D data set from the third quarter of 2016 through the third quarter of 2026 for issuers named “Tides”, for related persons named Sean Kia, Ryan Andrade or Tides, and for issuers at Tides' two office addresses (11601 Wilshire Boulevard, used in the 2018-2019 filings, and 11726 San Vicente Boulevard, Suite 600, the address a lender used for Tides Equities, LLC in May 2025). The last match is September 19, 2019. The filings do not say why. The 2020-2022 vehicles may have been filed under names and people we could not link to Tides, or not filed at all. Either way, an investor checking EDGAR in 2021 would have found nothing on Tides' newer deals. For how other sponsors' filings compare, see our syndication Form D dataset.

The 2024 foreclosure wave, property by property

The clearest numbers on what happened to Tides properties come from the lenders' own sworn filings in New York, which list each loan, the balance just before the trustee's sale and the price the lender paid with a credit bid (bidding the debt instead of cash).

Totals are our sums. The Tides on 44th line is the starkest: the debt had grown past the original loan to $50.0 million, and the lender bid $26.3 million, about 53% of what was owed (our arithmetic). Across the three Starwood-originated loans, credit bids of $147.8 million left at least $50.4 million unpaid (our arithmetic from the three affirmations).

Three more properties changed hands outside this table:

• Tides on Haverwood (Texas). Benefit Street's CLO indenture of June 29, 2022 lists a $62,003,114 participation in this loan. FBRT's 2025 annual report describes a $66.7 million Texas multifamily loan from November 2021 that it took “through foreclosure” in January 2025 and sold in February 2025. The 10-K does not name the property, but its subsidiary list includes FBRT Haverwood Owner, LLC, and The Real Deal reported a Haverwood foreclosure on January 10, 2025.
• Tides on Westcreek (Texas). Listed at $28,978,895 in Benefit Street's September 2023 CLO. FBRT reports a $32.8 million May 2022 Texas loan that went non-performing in October 2025 and that it took by foreclosure in December 2025; FBRT Westcreek Owner, LLC appears on the same subsidiary list.
• Tides on Green Oaks (The Dryden Apartments, Arlington, Texas). Electra Capital, which made a $4,575,000 mezzanine loan in June 2021, says in its January 2025 complaint that it now owns the property's owner entity after enforcing its equity collateral.

The lenders' filings describe the same pattern: missed payments (Chadwick missed every payment date from March through September 2024, its lender says), rate caps not maintained, renovations left unfinished and contractors' liens left unpaid. The liens mattered more than their size suggests. The largest single lien listed on Tides on Trinity is $232,298, yet under the loan documents an unbonded mechanic's lien was a “Springing Recourse Event” that made the whole remaining debt a personal obligation of the guarantors.

The guaranty suits against Kia and Andrade

When a foreclosure leaves debt unpaid, a non-recourse lender normally has no one else to collect from. These loans carried recourse guaranties that switch to full personal liability on certain events, and the lenders sued on them in New York County Supreme Court, the forum the loan documents chose.

The three Starwood-side cases were decided on the papers. In the Chadwick case, Justice Jennifer Schecter wrote on February 26, 2025: “There is no question of fact about defendants’ liability under the recourse guaranty”. In all three the trigger was the mechanic's liens. The judgments add up to $51,100,212.63 (our sum), and the plaintiffs' lawyers filed satisfactions stating that each had been “wholly and fully satisfied”. The court records do not say where the money came from.

The other six cases ended without a ruling on the merits. The ACRES stipulation says the McCallum case was “resolved pursuant to the Confidential Settlement Agreement” of July 1, 2025; the Electra and Rialto stipulations say only that the actions were discontinued with prejudice. Electra alleged that Tides promised it “at least a 12% return” on its preferred equity and then let the two Las Vegas properties deteriorate and default on their senior loans of $42,870,000 (owed to MF1) and $52,625,000. Those allegations were never tested in court.

Two further cases naming Sean Kia appear in the New York index as not available to the public online, so we cannot say what they are.

Where LP investors stand: behind every one of these lenders

None of the nine public cases was brought by an investor in a Tides LLC. We found no Tides case in CourtListener's federal RECAP index, no SEC or FINRA action, and no investment-adviser or broker registration under the Tides Equities name. The litigation is lenders against guarantors.

That order matters for an LP. In a foreclosure, the property goes to the lender for its credit bid; when the bid is below the loan, as in every sale above, there is no surplus for the owners. The guarantors' personal payments then go to the lender to cover the shortfall. Nothing in these dockets is a recovery for the LLC members whose equity bought the properties.

Preferred equity ranks between the two, and one public company shows how that layer fared on one Tides deal:

New York Mortgage Trust, now renamed Adamas Trust, describes these as preferred interests “where the risks and payment characteristics are equivalent to an equity investment”. It booked losses of $3.3 million in 2024 and $7.0 million in 2025 on this one stake. Tides on 27th is a 260-unit Phoenix property, according to Multi-Housing News. When the layer that is paid before ordinary LP equity is carried at 7.4% of its 2023 value (our arithmetic), the common equity behind it is unlikely to be worth much, although only the deal's own reports can say.

The same ranking applies to Electra's preferred positions in the two Las Vegas deals and to its mezzanine loans on Randol West and Green Oaks: each sat ahead of the LPs.

CIM Group, MF1 and the other names in the story

• CIM Group was Tides' partner on one large purchase: the $255 million Del Mar Terrace deal of March 2022, with an approximately $19 million renovation plan. We found no primary record of a wider CIM-Tides partnership or of CIM taking over Tides properties. If you are in The Tides on 71st, CIM's role is set by that deal's operating agreement.
• MF1 (MF1 REIT II-A) held the senior loan on Tides on Valley View, according to Electra's complaint, and listed Tides on Country Club and Tides on 61st among the collateral of its 2022 CLO.
• Starwood: the Trinity, Chadwick and 44th loans were made in January 2022 by Starwood Property Mortgage Sub-10-A, L.L.C., and later held by single-purpose plaintiffs named after each property's address.
• ACRES Commercial Realty lists RCC Real Estate Acquisitions SPE, LLC, the plaintiff in two of the cases, among its subsidiaries in its 2025 annual report.

What a Tides LP can do with this

• Find your property in the tables. If it is one of the eight properties taken back, your LLC's main asset is gone. Ask the sponsor for the final accounting and the year the LLC will issue its last K-1. Our tax-loss guide for crowdfunding and syndication losses explains how a worthless partnership interest is usually reported.
• If your property is not listed, that is not good news by itself. The list covers what lenders filed in New York and what public REITs disclosed; many loans sit with private lenders or agency programs that publish nothing about individual borrowers. Ask for the current loan balance, maturity date, rate-cap status and any default notices.
• If you were asked for a capital call (trade press reported Tides capital calls in 2023; the notices are private and we have not seen them), your operating agreement decides what happens if you do not fund: dilution, a penalty or the loss of your interest.
• Read the guaranty news correctly. The $51.1 million in satisfied judgments went to Starwood-side lenders. It does not reduce what investors lost, and it does not create a claim for LPs.
• Before you invest with a similar sponsor, search EDGAR for its Form D filings and compare the dates with the deals it advertises. Our red-flags checklist and failures tracker cover other cases; Ashcroft Capital is a sponsor that paused payouts but kept filing.

This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.

FAQ

Sources, read on October 8, 2026: 15 Form D filings on SEC EDGAR by Tides-managed issuers (2017-2019; accession on every row of the CSV) and the SEC Form D data sets from 2016 Q3 to 2026 Q3; NYSCEF dockets and documents of New York County Supreme Court Index Nos. 659373/2024, 659368/2024, 659372/2024, 659330/2024, 650356/2025, 650185/2025, 652968/2025, 652978/2025 and 655958/2024 (affirmations, complaints, decisions, satisfactions of judgment and stipulations); Franklin BSP Realty Trust's 8-K exhibits for BSPRT 2022-FL9 and 2023-FL10 and its 2025 Form 10-K and Exhibit 21; MF1 REIT II-A's ABS-15G of November 4, 2022; New York Mortgage Trust / Adamas Trust Forms 10-Q and 10-K (2023-2026); ACRES Commercial Realty's 2025 Exhibit 21.1; CIM Group's press release of March 1, 2022; SEC IAPD and FINRA BrokerCheck searches. The Real Deal (January 10, 2025) and Multi-Housing News are cited only to identify properties. Sums and percentages are our arithmetic. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.