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report scam| Country | Mexico |
| City | Cancun Playa del Carmen, Q. Roo |
| Address | Plaza Progreso #20, Carretera Chetumal - |
| Phone | (877) 308-3813 |
| Website | https://www.kasahotels.com/ |
KASA Hotel Collection Reviews
BEWARE of KASA Hotels Investment Scam
The KASA Hotels Collection is a hotel brand created and owned by Richard Houghton, which he operates in tandem with his company Investment Properties Mexico AS de CV (a.k.a. IPM), headquartered in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Beware! Richard Houghton is a known scam artist and convicted criminal, with a long and sordid history of bilking unsuspecting investors of their life’s savings.
KASA Condo Hotel Model:
Richard Houghton began his KASA real estate scheme by developing condominium properties in the Riviera Maya and selling the individual units to international investors, mostly Americans and Canadians. He imposes deceptive rental management contracts and illegal HOA Bylaws on the condo owners that give IPM exclusive rights to rent out the units as part of the KASA Hotels brand for years to come. Houghton and his hired team have enticed investors with promises of high rates of return on investment (8%—14% ROI), but these are false promises which Houghton knows he cannot deliver. Instead, he effectively takes the investors’ condominiums hostage, and subjects owners to all sorts of abuses and crimes.
In 2016, when the first KASA property began at KASA Parota in Tulum, Richard Houghton’s employee Andrew Schisler was the face of KASA sales. Schisler was outwardly very charming and persuasive, but underneath his seemingly honest persona was lurking a dark and devious side. Schisler presented potential investors with unrealistic projections for high ROI, based on fraudulent numbers. IPM CEO Victor M. Ruiz Vazquez is equally complicit in this scam. Together, Schisler, Ruiz Vazquez, and Houghton misled buyers with deceptive contracts, and even gave owners intentionally mis-translated documents to further dupe them (by Mexican law the only legal version of a document is in Spanish, so buyers are tricked through inaccurate English translations provided by IPM). Houghton blatantly ignores the terms of his own contracts, and ignores or outright defies owners when they object. Don’t be fooled by Houghton’s claims of ignorance or innocence: his fraud is pervasive and was premeditated from the very onset of the KASA project. He knows that elderly international retirees who don’t speak Spanish are the perfect prey for his scams. Almost all of the KASA Parota owners have now joined together to fight Richard Houghton and kick KASA hotel out of their rightfully owned property. Most of these owners have officially terminated their rental management agreements and have attempted to take back possession of their units through the proper legal means. Houghton has responded by cutting off owners’ electricity, AC units, and water, and even going so far as to cut electrical wires in overt acts of sabotage. What’s more, after some owners changed their own locks to keep KASA out, Houghton ordered his staff to climb through the windows to enter units and change the locks back. Mr. Houghton has repeatedly committed serious federal crimes against the condominium owners. He continues to rent out their condos as part of the hotel, in direct defiance of owners’ formally and legally stated wishes.
After KASA Parota, Richard Houghton and his Investment Properties Mexico began pre-construction sales of condominiums at KASA Riviera Maya (Puerto Aventuras), KASA Ceiba (Tulum), and KASA Tzalam (Tulum). These properties are hopelessly delayed in their construction, and in many cases construction has totally stopped. Many buyers have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of their retirement savings, now with little hope that their condos will ever be completed. At KASA Riviera Maya, for example, the initial investors bought in 2016-2017, with a promised 12 month build time. That was five years ago, and still the project is not complet. For this property, Houghton took on partner Gary Gregg, a low-level developer with financial problems and a dubious past. Despite the fact that several owners have paid in full for their condos, Gregg and Houghton claim they don’t have enough money to complete them. Many KASA Riviera Maya owners are furious, have terminated their rental management agreements, and are currently in the process of filing federal lawsuits against Houghton, Gregg, and their associates. Similarly, at KASA Tzalam, Houghton has swindled investors out of their money. He claims that the land that he purchased for the Tzalam project was defrauded from him, so all money invested is gone until the case winds its way through the courts. In recent months, all or nearly all the IPM sales team has quit. They too have been cheated out of money by Houghton, and no longer want to risk being associated with this fraudulent enterprise.
Richard Houghton tricked many of the investors for all of these KASA projects into using his own crooked lawyers at QuAdrans Law and Finance to process the real estate purchases (https://quadranslawandfinance.com/en/). Buyers were told that the QuAdrans lawyers were knowledgeable and cheaper, and would make the process seamless and fast. However, this was another lie. QuAdrans is led by Gilberto Guzman, an unscrupulous and corrupt swindler who has been protecting Richard Houghton for the last 20 year, and who reportedly has been disbarred for his illegal dealings. Guzman and Houghton have been implicated in many real estate scams in Quintana Roo, including illegally selling about $4 million USD worth of “ejido” property (village communal lands) in the town of Muyil in 2015 (https://issuu.com/diariorespuesta/docs/respuesta101215). QuAdrans writes contracts that benefit KASA/IPM, and that leave investors with very few options to contest them. For example, the contracts require that any disagreement between the parties must go first to negotiation and then to arbitration, but there are many opportunities for Mr. Houghton and IPM to stall and delay this process at every step. The result being that the owner’s condominium is tied up in a legal battle for years, all the while with KASA renting it out against the owner’s will. During this process, Mr. Houghton physically denies access to owners and their guests, and he keeps all the rental revenues. Yes, read that again: KASA rents out the condos in direct defiance of owners’ wishes, but does not give the owner any of the profits. The owner has to suffer tremendous wear and tear on his/her unit, high electricity bills from hotel guests, is required to pay exceedingly high HOA dues, and gets NO profits.
Another devious and ugly tactic used by QuAdrans and Richard Houghton is to intentionally not properly register the condominium titles. For example, at the KASA Riviera Maya property in Puerto Aventuras, owners have had their titles in limbo for years. Because Houghton will not complete the filing process, owners are powerless to obtain their rightful title deeds without a lengthy legal battle. This is part of his scam from the beginning. He consistently does whatever he can to trick owners and cause legal delays that allow him to keep using the properties while owners are left with little recourse.
KASA Investment Fund:
In July of 2019, Richard Houghton’s real estate scam took a new sinister turn. In that year, Mr. Houghton created the KASA Investment Fund, which offers shares in the KASA Hotel brand. A buyer does not get any real property, just a share in the hotel collection. The website offers a “100% secure real estate investment” and “15%+ annual income” (https://www.investmentpropertiesmexico.com/investors). This Fund is seemingly nothing but an elaborate Ponzi scheme. A slick website promises “Coming Soon” locations in Belize, Turks and Caicos, the Virgin Islands, and Costa Rica, but the land for these projects has not even been purchased. Houghton has assumedly pocketed or squandered millions of USD of KASA Fund investors’ money, and these projects will never be built. After all, if Houghton has run out of money to even finish the projects in his home-base of Mexico, how would he possibly be able to complete projects thousands of miles away on remote islands?
Richard Houghton’s Criminal Past:
Richard Houghton has a long history of criminal behavior, mostly involving the defrauding of investors. This is all documented on the internet: do your own research or check out the links below. About 20 years ago, he was convicted of securities fraud in California for selling shares in a movie scam. The court ordered him to pay $18 million in restitution and penalties, but he never complied. He also filed for bankruptcy in California in 2002 (http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/bap/2012/12/10/Houghton-05-1172.pdf). To escape his legal and financial troubles, Houghton fled to Mexico, where he started his next investment scam which led the formation of Investment Properties Mexico, KASA Hotels, and KASA Fund. Houghton’s former IPM business partner, Sean O’Neal, is currently serving a 4-1/2 year prison term for securities fraud in relation to his IPM sales of Mexican real estate to American investors (https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2020/comp24952.pdf). Houghton claims to be innocent of any involvement, but this is hard to believe given the circumstances and his own past.
Stay clear of Richard Houghton and any investment scheme in which he is involved!
Additional links:
Producers pay for scheme - Variety