How do you build a huge portfolio of Baltimore rentals? It helps to know a guy.

Shraga Lerner was on track to become a real estate mogul.

The Baltimore native spent his early 20s in New York and South Florida, honing his craft. A few years ago, he returned home and helped out-of-state investors scoop up hundreds of rowhouses.

Then everything imploded. Industry insiders have called the flood of foreclosures washing over Baltimore a mortgage fraud scheme. Lerner now faces his own portfolio collapse — and a criminal investigation.

A review of property records shows that Lerner played a key role connecting a group of New York investors to Baltimore’s housing market. He sold them close to 200 homes. They occasionally listed his office in Canton as a mailing address for their companies. And sometimes Lerner brokered other deals for them as a real estate agent.

The names of these investors, including Benjamin Eidlisz and Eluzer Gold, circulated last fall on so-called “blacklists” — warnings from Wall Street about potential misconduct. By the end of the year, federal investigators had subpoenaed business records from some of them.

The investors on the blacklists and the subpoena were all from New York, except one: Lerner.

Lerner did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The lanky 29-year-old grew up in Pikesville and attended Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School. He was on track to graduate in 2014, but a yearbook that year shows no sign that he was still enrolled. Mandy Miller, chief advancement officer for the school, declined to comment.

Around the time his classmates were midway through college, Lerner’s LinkedIn profile shows that he moved to New York to work in real estate. He returned to Baltimore a few years later, according to the profile.

Chris Cooke, a veteran Baltimore real estate agent, said he met Lerner sometime around 2019, when Lerner started working at his brokerage firm, at the time a franchise of RE/MAX.

Lerner had been in commercial real estate and had connections to investors from New York, Cooke said, but had just gotten his real estate license and wanted to work in residential sales. Cooke said he never witnessed any unethical or questionable behavior.

“It’s actually very surprising,” Cooke said of Lerner’s connection to the foreclosures now rippling across Baltimore. “He was very successful, a very hard worker, always on the phone, always putting deals together.”

Cooke said he later sold the franchise, located at 3500 Boston St. in Canton, and he hasn’t seen Lerner in a few years. The office is now a part of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices.

Florida court records show that Lerner spent most of 2021 living in the Trump Royale luxury condo tower in Miami-Dade County. While in Florida, he racked up six traffic tickets in seven months driving a new, black BMW.

He returned to Baltimore the following year, according to city property records, but he didn’t take his eye off Florida.

In late 2024, Lerner used an LLC to buy two small multifamily properties in Miami Beach for $2.15 million, property records show; he sold them this January for $2.05 million.

Up until March, Lerner had been listed online as a real estate agent for the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices office in Canton.

After The Banner reported that Lerner was named in a criminal subpoena, his profile was removed from the company’s website.

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices did not respond to a request for comment.

Among some Baltimore real estate investors, Lerner is primarily known as a wholesaler, someone who quickly buys and sells properties. Wholesalers connect individual property owners to investors trying to assemble rental portfolios.

Property records show that Lerner’s first sale to the New York investors was in October 2022, for a two-story rowhouse in the North Baltimore neighborhood of Barclay. Over the next two and a half years, Lerner sold 171 more homes to a handful of companies operated by Eidlisz and Gold from Rockland County, New York. He took that property collection, which had previously sold for $10 million, and sold them in chunks and packages for more than $37 million.

Most of these homes are now in foreclosure.

It’s not clear exactly how much Lerner made from the sales. Rather than directly buy homes himself, Lerner sometimes acquired limited liability companies that already owned small portfolios of homes. All told, public records show that Lerner used about two dozen LLCs to buy, sell and manage homes in Baltimore.

Lerner also played a role in other deals made by the New York investors.

Melvin Davis said Lerner approached him in 2023 with a generous offer for an East Baltimore investment property. Davis, a longtime fix-and-flip investor in Baltimore, had bought the home for $13,000 about five years earlier and renovated it. He said Lerner offered $100,000.

When it came time to sign the settlement papers, the deal was recorded as a $220,000 home sale to an LLC controlled by Gold. But at the settlement table, Davis said $92,000 went to an LLC controlled by Eidlisz, and $15,000 went to a third LLC controlled by Lerner.

Davis said the arrangement seemed “weird,” but harmless. He said they made similar deals for other homes in the area.

Lerner is not currently a licensed real estate agent in Maryland, state records show, but he is still a landlord.

Through Brooklyn18 LLC, Lerner owns more than 70 rowhouses scattered across Baltimore. Almost all were purchased in 2024 and last year. More than a third are now in foreclosure.

Crystal Goodman, 40, and her family have lived in a two-story rowhouse on the 3000 block of Janice Avenue in South Baltimore for about six years. After Brooklyn18 bought her home, Goodman said, the monthly rent dropped from $1,500 to $1,250, but it took two months of badgering the company to fix a leaky roof that was damaging her son’s bedroom.

Across the street, Thersha Hall, 63, called her home a “piece of crap.” She said she pays her rent through an app called DoorLoop and never knew Lerner’s name until the foreclosure paperwork showed up.

“I don’t know who’s collecting all this money,” Hall said. “It seems kinda suspect now.”

A few blocks away on Rittenhouse Avenue, 66-year-old Mabel Evans was fuming. Evans said she and her grandson have lived in the home for four years. When Lerner bought the house, she said, her monthly rent increased $50 to $1,364.

The January snowstorm damaged her roof, and it’s been leaking ever since, Evans said. The leak soaked her bed and damaged her possessions. To Evans, who suffers from arthritis and lives on a fixed income, it didn’t seem fair that she has to pay rent if her landlord isn’t paying the mortgage.

“How can you get away with that?” she asked.