Rise48 Equity Review 2026: 64 Form D Issuers, $1.1 Billion Sold, Lawsuits and What the Records Show

Rise48 Equity at a glance: what its SEC filings show

Rise48 Equity LLC is the Scottsdale, Arizona sponsor behind a long list of apartment deals. Its website says it has corporate offices in Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina. In a July 3, 2024 press release the company called its two Charlotte purchases its “52nd and 53rd acquisitions since 2019”. That is the company’s claim, and we did not verify it. What we can read is the paper trail: each deal is a separate LLC that files its own Form D, and the filings name the people and firms behind it.

Two cautions about Form D numbers. First, “amount sold” is what the issuer had sold when it filed or last amended; an offering that is still selling will be higher by now, and amendments sometimes lower it. Second, a Form D says nothing about performance: it does not show distributions, occupancy, debt or returns. For how these filings work across sponsors, see our real estate syndication Form D dataset.

Is Rise48 Equity legit? Regulators, courts and what we could not search

“Legitimate” and “low risk” are different questions. On the first, the records are plain: Rise48 deals are private placements notified to the SEC under Regulation D (a Form D is a notice, not an SEC registration or approval), the filings name broker-dealers by CRD number (see below), and the issuers have filed continuously for six years. On regulators and courts, we looked in these places:

So the honest answer is: no regulator action and no federal lawsuit against Rise48 found, with the biggest gap being county records. If you hold a Rise48 deal, a title search on your property’s parcel is the only way to rule out a recorded default notice.

The only federal cases: Rise48 as plaintiff

On May 5, 2026, Rise48 Equity LLC filed two cases against an “Unknown Party” in the District of Arizona: No. 2:26-cv-03145 and No. 2:26-cv-03147. The court’s order in the first one describes the complaint as asserting “only state- law claims for defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and tortious interference with business expectancy” (the hyphen break is in the order). Judge Michael T. Liburdi noted that the complaint named a defendant whose citizenship was “currently unknown” and did not identify Rise48’s own members, and on May 6, 2026 dismissed the case without prejudice for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. Without prejudice means Rise48 could refile in state court. The second case, filed the same day, shows a complaint and two administrative entries on the free docket and no ruling.

This is not a lawsuit against Rise48, and it does not say who the unknown party is or what was said. Suits against an unnamed defendant are usually filed to identify an anonymous author, but the order does not say who or what, and we have not seen the complaint, so we draw no conclusion from it.

Where the money came from: every Form D by year

We grouped each Form D with its amendments into one offering and took the latest figures. By the year of the offering’s first Form D:

The shape matters more than the total. The biggest year was 2022 ($317,531,032 sold across 14 offerings, the Encore deal alone $44,144,475 from 376 investors). Since then each deal is smaller and has fewer investors: $22.7 million and 236 investors per offering in 2022, against $13.6 million and 68 in 2026 (our arithmetic). The counts for 2020 and 2026 cover a partial year or few offerings.

The August 2025 filings: sixteen older deals raised again

This is the part of the record an LP in a 2021 or 2022 Rise48 deal should read first. Between August 8 and August 12, 2025, sixteen entities that had each filed a Form D in 2020-2022 for an original equity raise filed a new Form D, with a first sale between April 30 and July 31, 2025. Together they sold $32,510,164 to 1,880 investor slots, against $339,657,972 and 3,035 slots in their original offerings (our arithmetic): about 9.6% of the original dollars. The table shows each entity, with investors in brackets.

What the filings say: nothing about purpose. Every one of the sixteen lists the same Rise48 officers, reports $0 in sales commissions and no sales-compensation recipient, and reports $0 paid to officers or promoters. What the pattern is consistent with is follow-on equity into existing deals, which investors usually experience as a capital call or a recapitalization, but only the notices sent to investors can confirm that, and we have not seen any. The investor counts are lower than in the originals (for example 169 against 276 for Rise Broadway Partners), which fits a raise from part of the existing investor base. Our Ashcroft Capital page shows how a comparable situation looked in another sponsor’s record, where the capital call itself was documented in an investor email; here we have only the Form D.

Who gets paid: acquisition fees, brokers and non-accredited investors

Payments to insiders. Item 16 of a Form D asks how much of the proceeds is used to pay executive officers, directors or promoters. 60 Rise48 offerings report a figure above zero, totalling $76,512,444 (our sum), about 7.4% of the $1,040,055,450 those offerings sold (our arithmetic). The explanations in the filings are almost all “Acquisition Fee”; from 2024 many add “Equity Management Fee”, and one 2021 filing (Rise Preserve) lists a $157,000 construction management fee. Most of these amounts are flagged as estimates. An acquisition fee is normally paid when the property is bought, not when it performs, so it is worth knowing what share of each raise it takes.

Brokers. Rise48 sells through registered broker-dealers, which the Form D lists with their CRD numbers:

Sales commissions in dollars are reported on only 22 of the 81 offerings, $4,599,034 in total (our sum): the larger 2021-2023 deals and, again, three of the 2026 deals (Bluestone $295,525, Silver Lake $174,125 and Northern $50,000). The terms are sometimes more than a commission. A 2021 Form D for Rise Melrose, LLC says the units are offered directly and through a broker-dealer, and that the company will pay “(a) a 3% commission on funds placed with the Company, (b) 10% of the Asset Management Fee, and (c) up to 30% of the Class D Membership Units”. A broker paid out of the asset management fee and the units has an incentive that lasts as long as the deal does; ask which share class and fee terms apply to your deal.

Non-accredited investors. 76 of the 81 offerings report that they have non-accredited investors, 1,382 in total across offerings (our sum, people can repeat), with as many as 35 in a single offering, the Rule 506(b) cap. Only three Rule 506(c) offerings and two others report none. Rise48’s website says it offers deals to both accredited and non-accredited investors. If you invested as a non-accredited investor, you should have been given a full disclosure package, and it is worth reading it again.

New products since 2025: Preferred Equity, Income and Private Credit funds

Besides the single-property LLCs, Rise48 has five pooled funds on EDGAR. Rise Fund II (2022) barely started. Three more launched in 2025:

Rise Private Credit Fund’s first Form D (August 19, 2025) reported $5,549,200 sold to 59 investors; the October 8, 2025 amendment reports $5,151,100 and 53, so the fund shrank between filings. Its filing also adds three outside managers, each through their own company, as executive officers. Rise Fund III, tied for the most Form D filings of any issuer, shows the pace of a fund raise:

Rise Fund III has a $20,000,000 offering size and has sold $7,087,000 to 49 investors as of its last amendment on August 1, 2025, and it has no Form D amendment since. It is one of three Rise48 offerings filed under Rule 506(c), the other two being Rise West Arlington Partners (second round) and the Preferred Equity Fund.

Debt, defaults and what the press said

Syndication distress normally shows up in loan documents, not Form Ds. We found no public loan-level data for Rise48 properties. The one outside datapoint is a headline: on November 14, 2023 The Real Deal wrote that Rise48’s “watchlisted debt tops $250M” and that its founder “had told investors four months ago, ‘We are not distressed’”. We could read only the headline and standfirst on the outlet’s tag page, not the article, and do not know what the figure is based on, so treat it as a report, not a finding. On Rise48’s side, the company kept buying through 2025 and 2026: in 2026 our count shows 6 new acquisition vehicles, which report $81,472,290 sold.

Putting the two together: we found no public sign of lender enforcement, though we could not search county records, and the August 2025 re-raise and the 2023 report are consistent with the pressure that hit value-add multifamily bought on floating-rate debt in 2021-2022, the same pressure behind failures we list in real estate crowdfunding failures. For a sponsor where a federal court did test investor claims, see our First National Realty Partners review.

What a Rise48 investor or prospect can do with this

• Find your entity. The deal names are in the CSV; the Form D for your LLC shows the offering size, investor count, broker-dealer and what was paid to the sponsor. Compare it with your subscription documents.
• If you hold one of the sixteen older deals, compare the 2025 notices you received with the filing for your entity in the table above, and ask the sponsor in writing what the 2025 equity was used for (debt service, a rate cap, renovations) and whether non-participating investors were diluted.
• Ask for the loan terms: lender, maturity, floating or fixed, rate cap expiry and any extension test. This is the information a Form D does not contain.
• Check recorded documents yourself. County recorder and court searches in Maricopa County, Texas counties and Mecklenburg County are public, and we could not run them.
• If you are considering a new Rise48 offering, note that recent deals are smaller (average of $13.6 million sold in 2026), can include non-accredited investors, and pay an acquisition fee out of the raise.

Our read

The record supports a narrow conclusion. Rise48 is a real, SEC-notice-filing sponsor with six years of continuous activity, a stable team of named officers, broker-dealers identified by CRD number and, so far as federal records show, no regulator action and no investor or lender litigation. That is a thinner story than the search results suggest. What the same record shows is a sponsor whose 2020-2022 vintages raised new equity in 2025, whose new deals are smaller and attract fewer investors, and which reports acquisition fees on nearly every offering. Neither fact is a finding of wrongdoing. Both are reasons to read the loan terms of any Rise48 deal before adding money. The 3.0 rating reflects disclosure, not returns: we cannot see distributions, exits or full-cycle results for any Rise48 deal.

Sources, read on October 8, 2026: SEC EDGAR Form D and Form D/A filings and filing indexes of the 64 Rise48-linked issuers (accession numbers in the CSV); the Order dismissing Rise48 Equity LLC v. Unknown Party, No. 2:26-cv-03145 (District of Arizona, Doc. 4, May 6, 2026) and the CourtListener RECAP docket records for Nos. 2:26-cv-03145 and 2:26-cv-03147; the Rise48 Equity press release of July 3, 2024 (PR Newswire); the Rise48 website; and the headline of The Real Deal article of November 14, 2023 as shown on its tag page (article not read). Totals, per-offering groupings and percentages are our arithmetic from the Form D figures. Payments to officers are the use-of-proceeds figures in the filings, mostly estimates. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.