RealT Review (2026): Detroit Lawsuit, SEC Filings, Token Terms

What RealT’s own website still says (October 13, 2026)

RealT’s homepage, read on October 13, 2026, says “Join 20,000+ token holders” and “Earning 6-16% rental income yearly since 2019.” It also shows “65K+” registered investors and “$29+ million” of income distributed. The saved copy of the page contains no use of the word “liquidation” (our search of the page text). The footer says the site “is operated by RealToken Inc., which is not a registered broker-dealer or investment advisor.” The registration form asks whether you are “a resident or citizen of the United States or its territories,” and the affiliate page says “US investors are not allowed to participate in the program at this time.” These are website claims on the date shown, not audited figures.

Compare that with what RealT told its own holders. In a post dated April 1, 2026, RealT wrote that it had kept “a ‘no comment’ policy” while litigation was ongoing and that on “Monday, March 30” it reached “a preliminary agreement with the City.” Outlier Media reported that a February 2026 email to investors said “The model no longer works” and that weekly rental distributions would be suspended. Outlier also reported that on a July 2, 2026 call co-founder Jean-Marc Jacobson said: “We are entering voluntary liquidation. We are going to sell every asset, all of them.” The same report says the City’s counsel stated that RealT had yet to file anything in court. We did not find that call recorded in a RealT post or in a court filing.

The court record: City of Detroit v. Michigan Real Token I LLC et al.

The case is No. 25-010288-CH in the Wayne County Circuit Court, Hon. Annette J. Berry. The plaintiff is the City of Detroit; the City’s Law Department filed it. The complaint is dated June 30, 2025 and describes RealT as “operating a large-scale cryptocurrency real estate venture in Detroit.” It names the two co-founders and co-chief executive officers as defendants in a personal-liability count, and it lists two earlier nuisance cases before the same judge: Nos. 24-009122-CH and 25-002868-CH. Everything below that is not an order is an allegation by the City.

What the City alleged in its January 2026 motion

The motion for a receiver is the most recent filing of the City we could read in full. It alleges that as of September 30, 2025 RealT held “at least $123,643.60” in a Bank of America account, that RealT never provided the accounting the December 5, 2025 order required, and that it asked for $440,200 to rehabilitate fourteen properties of which “eleven have not paid into escrow and are believed to be vacant.” It also alleges that on December 17, 2025, of thirteen addresses with known health and safety issues, five had been resolved by tenants or the City’s inspectors, seven were unresolved and one tenant could not be reached. The City wrote: “Defendants have violated this Court’s Orders.” RealT disputes the City’s account in the press; its attorney said the arrangement it later accepted “has a sunset provision” and that “We intend to repair and rehabilitate” the properties. RealT’s earlier public position, quoted by Outlier Media, was that it had been “one of many victims in Detroit of several unscrupulous property management companies.”

The press reports a second milestone: Outlier Media wrote on April 29, 2026 that officials put the City’s escrow account at “a little less than $640,000,” that the agreement targets about a dozen properties a month and 210 properties with a Certificate of Compliance by October 2027, and that the founders must add money if escrow runs out. Those details come from officials’ summaries, not from the agreement.

What Detroit’s own records show, read October 13, 2026

The City publishes its parcel file, blight tickets, rental registrations, Certificates of Compliance and vacant-property registrations as open data. We matched owner names that contain “REAL TOKEN” or “REALTOKEN” (and, for tickets, “REALT ”), saved the script and its output, and counted. This is a name match: it finds 438 parcels, while the complaint lists 408 properties and press reports say about 700 Detroit properties were tokenized, and some parcels sit in other names. Read the figures as a floor for what the City has on record under these names, not as RealT’s total.

The timing is the notable pattern. Tickets by issue year are 24 (2021), 205 (2022), 339 (2023), 545 (2024), 2,553 (2025) and 650 (2026 so far), so 59.1% of all tickets were issued in 2025 (our arithmetic). The biggest category is a missing Certificate of Compliance (889 tickets), followed by bulk solid waste (365), excessive weeds or plant growth (345) and a missing rental registration (292). Another 1,068 tickets were dismissed or found not responsible, which is worth keeping in view: a ticket count is not a finding. The City’s layers show these parcels as taxable, with no tax-foreclosed status; we could not read the Wayne County Treasurer’s 2026 foreclosure list (the site refused automated access), so we cannot say which parcels are delinquent.

What this does and does not show: the tickets are against owner entities, usually a series of property companies, and a token holder is a member of one of them (see the terms section). Whether a ticket or judgment becomes a claim on the property depends on the entity’s documents and on the court, and we have not seen those documents.

SEC EDGAR: 17 Form D notices from 2022, then nothing

EDGAR has no entity named RealT. The company search for “realtoken” returns 17 Delaware corporations at 980 N Federal Hwy, Boca Raton, Florida, each named “RealToken” plus a street address, each with one Form D and no other filing. Our existing census of tokenized real estate on EDGAR lists them one by one; here is what they add up to, by filing date.

Four details in the filings matter more than the totals. First, 16 of the 17 claim Rule 506(c), under which the rule says “All purchasers of securities sold in any offering under paragraph (c) of this section are accredited investors” (17 CFR 230.506(c)(2)(i)); the 17th claims Rule 506(b). Stated minimums are $47 to $52, so (our reading) a U.S. buyer of a token from one of these 17 companies had to be accredited. Second, four of the 506(c) filings tick “has non-accredited investors” while reporting 0, which is a form inconsistency we cannot explain. Third, every filing reports $0 in sales commissions and an empty sales-compensation list, while RealT’s April 2022 General Disclaimer says the tokens “will be offered and sold only through a broker-dealer registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission” (the source is in capital letters) and its homepage says RealToken Inc. “is not a registered broker-dealer.” We do not know which entity acted as placement agent, if any, and the Form D does not say. Fourth, RealT’s Terms of Service of October 11, 2022 say the tokens were not registered and rely on “Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act and Rule 506 of Regulation D … and/or Regulation S.” Sales to non-U.S. persons under Regulation S (17 CFR 230.901 to 230.905) carry no Form D requirement that we know of (our reading), so the 17 filings are not a count of everything RealT sold.

Scale is the point. Outlier Media reported on August 28, 2025 that RealT had sold $94 million of tokens for roughly 700 Detroit properties. The Form D notices report $110,447 sold, about 0.12% of that figure (our arithmetic; the dates and scopes differ). We found no other EDGAR filing by any entity with RealT or Real Token in its name that would cover the rest. That is a fact about EDGAR, not a finding that any sale was improper: sales outside the United States under Regulation S do not appear there. We found no SEC enforcement action against RealT or RealToken, no state securities regulator action, and no bankruptcy case in a CourtListener RECAP search for “Real Token” and “RealToken” on October 13, 2026 (RECAP is not a full copy of PACER, and absence of a result is not proof of absence).

The terms in RealT’s own documents

RealT’s offering documents for each property are private, sent to buyers after they register, so the public terms are RealT’s website, its Terms of Service, a General Disclaimer and one old offering memorandum it still hosts: the private placement memorandum for Series #1, amended August 15, 2019. Later series may differ, and we have not seen them. What the 2019 memorandum says is the clearest public statement of the structure.

Two points follow from the order of payment. First, when a series liquidates, holders are paid after creditors, and the memorandum names the Managing Member’s own affiliates among those creditors (our reading: unpaid advances to the series rank ahead of you). Second, the fees above come off the property’s cash before distributions, and the manager’s fee applies to repairs as well as to rent, so a repair-heavy property pays the manager even when the owner receives less (our reading).

Exit: what RealT says it will do, and who has the final say

RealT’s January 26, 2026 post describes the problem plainly: some properties “have experienced near-zero buying interest for extended periods,” and the issuer buyback can leave RealT holding 10%, 15% or more of a property’s tokens. Its rules, as posted, work by thresholds.

On January 28, 2026 RealT also proposed a vote to let the director of a property-owning company sell without further votes, on stated parameters such as a listing price, citing the City’s June 2025 action as the reason the earlier plan was “derailed.” The March 30 preliminary agreement and the April 22 order then changed who decides: Outlier Media reported that the fiduciary “has final say over whether Detroit properties can be sold,” that the City gets a 24-hour review window on sales, and that on the July 2 call the co-founder said the fiduciary “already had the authority” to sell. Detroit’s counsel said the City would try to give tenants and first-time homebuyers a chance to buy. (Press reports; the order is not public.) For a holder, the practical reading (ours) is that an exit for Detroit tokens depends on sale prices set by a court-supervised process, that proceeds go first to the creditors ranked above you in the memorandum, and that no one has published a recovery estimate.

Other claims against RealT

• City of Detroit, other cases. The complaint lists Nos. 24-009122-CH and 25-002868-CH as earlier nuisance cases before the same judge. Outlier Media reported that the June 2024 case over one apartment building settled with four installment payments of $17,500 and a repair deadline.
• Investors in France. A French law firm’s page says (in French) that several victims have contacted it since spring 2026, estimates about 22,000 clients worldwide and nearly 14,000 in France, and offers a paid collective criminal complaint to the Paris financial prosecutor, with a second filing planned for the end of 2026; the sign-up form shows a price of 360.00 euros. It is a law firm’s page, not a court record, and we did not verify that a complaint has been filed.
• Regulators. We found no SEC action, no state securities action and no bankruptcy case. Absence from our search is not a clearance.

What we could not verify

• The agreement and the orders after April 22, 2026. Neither the fiduciary agreement nor the order approving it was available to us; the account above rests on Outlier Media’s reporting and on RealT’s own April 1, 2026 post. The Wayne County docket was not readable by us. The end-of-October 2026 fiduciary report may change the picture within weeks.
• A liquidation. The July 2, 2026 statement is reported from a recorded investor call. We found no court filing, bankruptcy petition or RealT notice that carries it out, and RealT’s homepage still advertises yields.
• Current payouts and token prices. Outlier Media reported in March 2026 that RealT had stopped almost all weekly payouts and that tokens traded far below original value on secondary markets. We did not read on-chain data.
• Tax and foreclosure status. The Wayne County Treasurer’s 2026 foreclosure list could not be read, and the City’s parcel layer shows these parcels as taxable.
• Ownership of specific properties. Outlier Media reported properties sold to investors where another party holds the deed. We did not check deeds at the Wayne County Register of Deeds.

What a RealT holder, or someone thinking of buying, can do with this

• Find your property’s entity. Each token belongs to a series or a property company. Search the street address in the City of Detroit’s parcel and blight-ticket layers (the script we used is in our sources) and compare the owner name with the one on your RealT dashboard.
• Save everything RealT sent you: the subscription agreement, the offering memorandum for your series, payout history, wallet addresses and the February and April 2026 emails. Any claim, in Detroit, France or elsewhere, starts from those records.
• Read the paragraphs that decide your position: distributions at the Managing Member’s “sole discretion,” the right to refuse transfers, and the payment order on liquidation. They are in the offering memorandum for your series, which may differ from the 2019 one we read.
• Treat recovery offers as sales pitches until you have seen a court docket. The French page above is a paid campaign for a complaint, not a court record. Ask any firm for the case number, the court and the fee agreement before paying.
• Watch the dates. The fiduciary’s report is due at the end of October 2026 in No. 25-010288-CH, and the judge then decides whether his term is extended. A sale of your property would run through that process.
• Ask a tax professional about the year’s paperwork. The 2019 memorandum says the series is to be taxed as a corporation and holders would receive a 1099 each year; whether that happened for your tokens is a question for RealT’s records and your preparer.
• If you are weighing a different tokenized platform, compare its filings first: our census of tokenized real estate on EDGAR, our Lofty review and HoneyBricks review, and the red flags checklist apply the same questions. For how platforms fail more generally, see how platforms actually fail.

FAQ

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

Sources, read and saved on October 13, 2026: the Verified Complaint in City of Detroit v. Michigan Real Token I LLC et al., No. 25-010288-CH (June 30, 2025; scanned copy hosted by Outlier Media, read by OCR) and the City’s motion for appointment of a receiver (January 6, 2026); the City of Detroit press release of July 23, 2025; City of Detroit open-data layers (parcel file, blight tickets, rental registrations, active residential Certificates of Compliance, vacant property registrations) read by script on October 13, 2026; SEC EDGAR company search for “realtoken”, the submissions record of each of the 17 CIKs and their Form D XML files; 17 CFR 230.506 as of October 8, 2026; RealT’s homepage, registration page, affiliate page and Terms page read on October 13, 2026; RealT’s Terms of Service (October 11, 2022), General Disclaimer (April 22, 2022) and Series #1 private placement memorandum (amended August 15, 2019); RealT posts on Medium of December 9, 2025, January 26 and 28, 2026 and April 1, 2026; reporting by Outlier Media and Michigan Public (July 9, August 28 and October 7, 2025; March 20, April 29 and July 16, 2026); the page of a French law firm on a RealT investor action; and a CourtListener RECAP search for “Real Token” and “RealToken” on October 13, 2026.