Bryan Simpson U.S. Courthouse in Jacksonville. [Charlie McGee/The Tributary]
For the second time within a year, one of the largest and most politically connected property management companies in Jacksonville has settled allegations that it violated the rights of its tenants.
The Department of Justice announced in June that it struck an agreement with JWB Rental Homes for the firm to compensate six military tenants after, according to federal officials, illegally charging them to end their leases early. Those allegedly illegal fees – which JWB said it corrected before anyone was improperly charged – were imposed after the servicemembers had to move because of relocation orders, according to federal officials.
The allegations complicate the reputation of a company that has had a years-long run of positive press for its work in housing and downtown development, but is also among the top eviction filers in military-friendly Jacksonville. And it gave fresh ammunition to critics of investor landlords generally and JWB specifically, some of whom attribute Jacksonville’s nationally recognized status as a high-eviction city to corporate interests, although other experts say the issue is more complicated.
“Corporate landlords are violating tenant rights routinely on a daily basis…This is not a one-off, unusual, JWB happens to be a bad apple,” said David Jaffee, a sociology professor at University of North Florida and director of the Jax Rental Housing Project. “The problem is much more systemic than that.”
JWB, which denied any wrongdoing in its settlement with the DOJ, noted that the scale of problems identified by the Department of Justice was small, but federal officials were nonetheless highly critical of the company’s alleged missteps.
“Our military families already shoulder the burden of military-ordered moves and deployments,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement about the recent settlement. “We will not allow them to be penalized by landlords for answering the call of duty for service.”
JWB agreed to compensate tenants over $39,000, and they will also pay a $25,000 civil penalty.
“JWB identified administrative errors within our system that could have led to incorrect fees for a small group of military residents – this impacted fewer than 1% of our military move-outs,” JWB co-founder and president Alex Sifakis said in an emailed statement. “JWB quickly reversed and remedied these issues before any deposit refunds were incorrectly charged. We have since updated our internal processes to ensure these errors do not happen again.”
The settlement comes as Sifakis enjoys relatively newfound status as a major player in downtown development and city politics.
After backing her opponent in the 2023 mayoral election, Sifakis quickly pivoted to cheerleading Mayor Donna Deegan’s administration and landed a role as the vice chair of a Deegan transition subcommittee on affordable housing.
Sifakis also worked behind the scenes on an effort to bring a UF graduate campus to downtown, which has progressed publicly with his fingerprints. Last month, the City Council approved a controversial land swap with Gateway Jax – a joint development venture Sifakis and JWB back – that provided the company prime riverfront real estate in exchange for a vacant office building on the west end of downtown that UF plans to use for a future downtown campus. Gateway bought that empty office building last year for $4 million – far less than what the developer later told the city it was truly worth.
Asked if knowledge of the DOJ allegations would have affected his vote on the land swap, City Council member Ron Salem, who was critical of the proposal but brokered a compromise measure, said, “I always want the City Council to have all the information possible any time we are discussing a piece of legislation of that type of significance.”
Past scrutiny of JWB
This is not the first time that JWB, the company Sifakis co-founded and that provides the foundation of his real-estate empire, has come under fire during his political ascent.
Last year, JWB faced allegations that it mistreated Black rental applicants. The company settled a lawsuit in November brought by Jacksonville Area Legal Aid on behalf of four Black renters alleging that its use of a faulty algorithm to screen tenants amounted to racial discrimination.
After a federal judge refused to dismiss the lawsuit, meaning it could have been headed for a jury trial, JWB agreed in a settlement to alter its screening process, which had relied on a tenant-screening service that wrongly reported evictions on an applicant’s record, or reported eviction filings that were thrown out in court, according to Jacksonville Area Legal Aid filings. No finding of discrimination was made in the case.
Jaffee, the UNF professor, said the Department of Justice allegations were just a small representation of a larger problem in a city with the highest eviction rate in Florida. It’s something advocates refer to as “financialization,” or the conversion of housing into an investment vehicle for the wealthy.
Advocates like Jaffee believe the widespread entrance of investment firms into the housing market sets up a fundamental conflict of interest between providing returns to shareholders – by cutting costs, extracting value, and maximizing profit – and providing safe and affordable housing to residents.
In an interview, Sifakis said the term “corporate landlord” carries negative connotations that don’t apply to the firm he co-founded in 2006. He said JWB – the acronym it adopted after rebranding years ago from its old name, “Jacksonville Wealth Builders” – is by and large a local property management company, not a far-flung, faceless corporation.
“We’re a local company owned by people that live and work and are raising their kids in Jacksonville,” he said.
But in different settings, JWB is open about the value it can accrue for investors, who, according to the company’s marketing materials, live in 43 states and 13 countries around the world.
While the company started out buying houses, it has since shifted to new-build construction and has labeled itself “Jacksonville’s leading provider of affordable housing.” Many of those new-build houses, according to JWB’s own data for 2023, were sold to investors. Others went to owner-occupants and the Jacksonville Housing Authority.
CoreLogic, an information services provider, classified investor landlords by size in 2023. Investors with 100-999 properties – which would include JWB, at 400 – were deemed “large investors.”
While not all research into corporate ownership is negative, a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that firms with 15 or more properties are more likely to file evictions than smaller landlords. Other studies show that larger landlords are more likely to own dilapidated buildings, or have more code violations in their buildings, than those with fewer holdings.
Tenants in affordable housing units, Jaffee said, are by definition lower-income and naturally have fewer options even when faced with unresponsive landlords. These are also families for whom evictions can carry multiple, life-altering consequences beyond the immediate loss of a home: evictions often make it harder to find new housing and have been linked to job loss and mental-health problems.
When asked about critiques of his business model, Sifakis said that JWB’s size is an asset, not a hindrance, to its renters. “Our residence relations coordinator…her whole job is to cut through whatever bureaucratic tape there is and get residents help when they need it. If you just manage one house yourself you don’t have access to someone like that, that has all these resources.”
According to JWB’s internal tracking system, the average resolution time for a maintenance request is 6.5 days, with 2.5 days for emergency requests.
It’s not hard to find critical reviews online of JWB properties – some have been catalogued by the Jax Rental Housing Project from tenants themselves – but Sifakis said his company’s own internal tenant-satisfaction metrics are above industry standard.
Jacksonville’s eviction problem
JWB is a big player in a city with a big eviction problem.
Duval county has the highest rate of eviction filings in the state – 8.12% – over twice that of Miami-Dade and well above counties in Orlando and Tampa, according to data from the University of Florida.
JWB was the top eviction filer in Duval in 2023, according to UF’s latest available landlord-specific eviction data.
Sifakis attributed JWB’s eviction numbers to his company’s size.
As a whole, Jacksonville stands out.
Juan Pablo Garnham, a spokesperson for Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, said Jacksonville has “long stood out for (its) high rates of eviction, not just in recent years, but historically,” though the reasons why can be more complicated.
“Understanding why landlords file more evictions [in Jacksonville] than in other Florida cities is complex,” he said in a statement. “Across the U.S., several factors can drive eviction rates, including the availability of affordable housing, rent levels, poverty rates, access to rental assistance, and how local laws and courts handle eviction proceedings.”
Deegan’s 2023 transition subcommittee, which Sifakis co-chaired, attributed Jacksonville’s housing woes to a slew of issues, including “persistent lack of public will to prioritize, coordinate, and fund low-and moderate-income housing development.” The subcommittee heard from both critics of corporate landlords, like Jaffee, and developers, including Sifakis-backed Gateway Jax.
That report recommended city officials “scrutinize policies and regulations that would decrease housing supply,” a suggestion that came from Sifakis.
High-profile housing woes
Regardless of its underlying causes, Jacksonville’s housing problems have broken through with residents in notable ways. For the first time in its history, residents rated housing costs as their top issue of concern in the UNF Public Opinion Research Lab’s June poll of more than 700 registered Duval County voters.
Jaffee said that for JWB, the DOJ penalty is little more than a slap on the wrist.
“For JWB, this is just the cost of doing business. It’s part of the system of privately-owned, for-profit, highly-financialized business practices,” he said.
Jim Kowalski, president of Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, which brought the racial discrimination suit against JWB, says he appreciated the company’s willingness to modify its policies.
“They agreed to settle the case and fix the policy. You want companies to be good citizens, follow the law, particularly when they’re partners with the city on so many projects…I want local companies to learn from their mistakes.”
Disclosure: Alex Sifakis has previously contributed The Tributary, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded by donations from readers, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in editorial decisions at The Tributary. Find our editorial policies here.
Mary Beech is The Tributary’s Investigative Reporting Fellow for summer 2025.
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