Red Tail Residential: Lawsuits, Fire Death, and Complaints

Red Tail Residential, a California-based apartment management company tied to Trinity Property Consultants and FPA Multifamily, has been sued over retaliatory eviction, source-of-income discrimination, a fatal high-rise fire, and tenant collection practices, and it carries a long record of unresolved maintenance and billing complaints. Most of the lawsuits that reach Red Tail hit it through its corporate siblings, because the same Irvine office runs properties under more than one name.

Who Red Tail Residential Actually Is

Red Tail Residential is headquartered at 2082 Michelson Drive in Irvine, California, and traces its origins to 1999.¹ It sits inside a larger operation: FPA Multifamily, LLC is the parent, and Trinity Property Consultants and Redwood Construction are affiliates. The combined entities employ more than 1,300 people.²

Around April 2022, Trinity Property Consultants began transitioning some of its property management operations to the Red Tail Residential name, with both entities working out of the same Irvine building. In court filings, Trinity Property Consultants has been identified as doing business as Red Tail Residential.³ If you’re searching the dockets, cases will often name Trinity rather than Red Tail, and vice versa.

The Wheaton Retaliatory Eviction Lawsuit

The most prominent case directly naming Red Tail Residential came out of the Arrive Apartments, a roughly 500-unit complex on Georgia Avenue in Wheaton, Maryland. On April 30, 2024, tenant Elzie Walker filed a civil complaint in the Circuit Court for Montgomery County against FPA/WC Wheaton Station, LLC, the property owner, and Trinity Property Consultants, LLC doing business as Red Tail Residential, the managing agent. The case was docketed as C-15-CV-24-002098.³

Walker, a six-year resident and cofounder of the Arrive Wheaton Tenants Association, alleged that management retaliated against him for organizing tenants and for complaining about his unit’s condition and the processing of his Section 8 voucher. The complaint set out four main allegations:

Retaliatory eviction after Walker’s organizing and condition complaints.
Source-of-income discrimination, citing data that the defendants were 24 times more likely to seek possession judgments against voucher holders than against unsubsidized tenants.
Illegal debt collection, based on a December 2023 failure-to-pay-rent filing over a balance Walker said was owed by the Housing Opportunities Commission under his voucher.
Interference with organizing rights, including the removal of flyers and denial of common meeting space.

Walker invoked Maryland’s landlord retaliation statute, Montgomery County’s tenant organizing protections, state and county source-of-income laws, the Maryland Consumer Debt Collection Act, and the Maryland Consumer Protection Act. He sought compensatory damages above $75,000, statutory damages of three times his monthly rent, injunctive relief against the eviction, and attorneys’ fees.³

The dispute had been building. In October 2023, Walker filed a complaint with the Montgomery County Office of Landlord-Tenant Affairs, which produced a late-November mediated agreement allowing tenant meetings and flyering. On December 26, 2023, management filed the failure-to-pay-rent action Walker later called harassment. On January 30, 2024, the defendants sent a notice terminating his tenancy effective April 30, 2024, which triggered the lawsuit.³

The defendants removed the case to federal court in June 2024, where it was assigned to Judge Peter J. Messitte in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland as case 8:24-cv-01689. The defendants filed a counterclaim, Walker answered it in July 2024, and after a consent extension of discovery, Walker filed his own motion to dismiss on November 25, 2024. Judge Messitte signed the dismissal order the next day.⁴ The public docket does not say whether a settlement was involved.

The Arrive Silver Spring Fire and Wrongful Death Suit

A separate case against Trinity Property Consultants, the entity operating as Red Tail Residential, grew out of a fatal fire at another Arrive-branded property. Before 6:00 a.m. on February 23, 2023, a fire broke out at the Arrive Silver Spring complex in Silver Spring, Maryland. Melanie Diaz, 25, died of smoke inhalation after encountering smoke in a fire escape stairwell. Nineteen other people were hospitalized, including three firefighters, and hundreds of residents were displaced.⁵

Diaz’s family filed a wrongful death suit on September 12, 2024, seeking $2.3 million from CP4 Silver Spring, LLC, the owner, and Trinity Property Consultants, the manager. The complaint alleged that smoke detectors in the unit of origin were nonfunctional, that none of the building’s fire alarms activated, and that the building had no fire sprinklers despite cosmetic renovations. It also alleged that a rooftop hatch had been sealed to accommodate a rooftop pool, hampering ventilation by firefighters.⁶ A second fire later occurred in a vacant unit in the same building in December 2023, during renovations tied to the first incident.⁵

The fire drove new law. Governor Wes Moore signed the Melanie Nicholle Diaz Fire Safety Act on May 16, 2024, setting new high-rise safety equipment standards and requiring lease disclosure when buildings lack automatic sprinklers. Montgomery County followed in mid-2024 with a measure requiring county-approved safety plans, round-the-clock building representation, and notification of service disruptions.⁵

Other Lawsuits Involving the Corporate Family

Florida: COVID-Era Rent Collection

In July 2020, tenant Justin Lawrence filed a putative class action in the Middle District of Florida against FPA Villa Del Lago, LLC, Trinity Property Consultants, and other FPA-affiliated entities. The suit arose from Lawrence vacating a student housing apartment early during the COVID-19 pandemic, and from the defendants’ pursuit of unpaid rent and fees. He alleged violations of the Florida Consumer Collection Practices Act along with rescission and unjust enrichment claims. The court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment on February 4, 2022, ending the case in the company’s favor, and denied class certification as moot.⁷

Illinois: Employee Fingerprint Collection

In Illinois, employee Isidro Calonia filed a proposed class action against Trinity Property Consultants and its payroll provider, Pacific Personnel Services, alleging the companies collected and stored employee fingerprints without consent and failed to maintain a publicly available data retention and destruction policy, in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. A federal judge denied Trinity’s motion to dismiss, allowing the case to move forward.⁸

Connecticut: Security Deposit

In Tolland County, Connecticut, tenant Haruka Kniffin filed a small claims case against Red Tail Residential in June 2023 over the return of a security deposit. A magistrate entered a judgment by stipulation in October 2023, and the plaintiff withdrew the action in November 2023.⁹

What Red Tail Is Not In: The RealPage Pricing Cases

Red Tail Residential, Trinity Property Consultants, and FPA Multifamily are not named defendants in the major RealPage algorithmic rent-pricing litigation. The consolidated multidistrict case, In re RealPage Inc. Rental Software Antitrust Litigation (MDL 3071) in the Middle District of Tennessee, alleges that RealPage and roughly 50 major apartment operators conspired to use algorithmic pricing tools to push rents above competitive levels. By mid-2026, two rounds of class settlements had reached nearly $360 million combined, with settling defendants agreeing to stop using RealPage’s revenue management system that relies on competitors’ nonpublic data.¹⁰ The Department of Justice and several state attorneys general also sued RealPage in federal court in North Carolina, producing a proposed consent decree with defendant LivCor, LLC published for public comment in January 2026.¹¹ Red Tail and its affiliates are not among the named operators in those proceedings.

Tenant Complaints Outside the Courts

Formal lawsuits are only part of the record. In recent Better Business Bureau reporting, 60 complaints had been filed against Red Tail Residential in the preceding three years. Service or repair issues were the largest category, with 30 complaints. Tenants described malfunctioning elevators, lack of heat or air conditioning, rodent infestations, sewage leaks, and long delays on maintenance requests. Another 14 complaints involved billing and payment portal disputes, with smaller numbers for lease and habitability issues.¹²

Resolution rates were low. Of the 60 complaints, 35 drew responses the complainant did not accept or confirm as resolved, 17 went unanswered, and only 7 were marked resolved. When the company responded, it often pointed to outside factors such as city ordinances governing HVAC schedules or reliance on third-party vendors, and frequently declined requests for rent adjustments or compensation. Tenants also reported trouble reaching a person, with automated chatbots sometimes standing in for human contact.¹³

1
Red Tail Residential. Red Tail Residential Homepage
2
Flippingbook. FPA Multifamily Corporate Overview
3
WUSA9. Walker v. FPA/WC Wheaton Station Complaint
4
PACER Monitor. Walker v. FPA/WC Wheaton Station, LLC et al
5
Multifamily Dive. Family of Woman Killed in Maryland Apartment Fire Sues Property Manager
6
Plaxen Adler Muncy. Wrongful Death Lawsuit Filed for Victim of Arrive Silver Spring Fire
7
vLex. Lawrence v. FPA Villa Del Lago, Summary Judgment Order
8
Bloomberg Law. Trinity Property Consultants Faces Employee Biometrics Lawsuit
9
Trellis Law. Kniffin v. Red Tail Residential, LLC
10
Multifamily Dive. RealPage Settlement Algorithmic Pricing
11
Federal Register. United States v. RealPage Inc. et al., Proposed Final Judgment
12
BBB. Red Tail Residential BBB Complaints
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BBB. Red Tail Residential BBB Complaints, Page 5