Ashcroft Capital.
Owner-operator.

Federal court records on CourtListener show employment-related suits against the firm and its management arm:

1. Cautero v. Ashcroft Legacy Funds (D.N.J., filed February 2025). An employment discrimination suit naming Ashcroft entities and Frank Roessler. The docket shows it terminated in October 2025.
2. Oluwatayo v. Birchstone Residential (N.D. Ga., filed March 2024). A race-based job discrimination claim, terminated in December 2024.
3. Stafford v. Birchstone Residential (N.D. Ga., filed February 2023). A civil rights case by self-represented plaintiffs, closed within weeks.

Many websites describe the Cautero case as an investor class action over misrepresented returns. The federal docket classifies it as an employment discrimination case. We found no court record of an investor fraud suit, and no reputable news outlet reporting one. No HUD, DOJ or fair housing actions against Ashcroft or Birchstone were found.

A Texas WARN layoff notice filed in August 2026 under the name Birchstone Management, LLC belongs to an unrelated Dallas warehousing and logistics company, not to Birchstone Residential. No layoff notices for Ashcroft or Birchstone Residential were found.

Frank Roessler is co-founder and CEO. Before founding Ashcroft in 2015 he worked at M&A Real Estate Partners, rising to asset manager. Joe Fairless is co-founder and managing partner and hosts a long-running real estate investing podcast. Before Ashcroft he worked in advertising in New York, starting at TBWA/Chiat/Day in 2005 and leaving as a vice president at SS+K. Scott Lebenhart, CIO and partner, joined in 2018 after 11 years in acquisitions at DRA Advisors. Sean Sabia runs asset management after roles at NYL, DRA Advisors and The Tuckerman Group.

Investor relations sit under Chautaqua Collins, Managing Director of Business Operations, who joined in 2016 and also oversees marketing and investor services. Danielle Jackson is Director of Investor Relations; business directories list her earlier at Minard Capital, an institutional consulting firm. Mark Pietrogiacomo leads business intelligence for the portfolio; he came from Cohen Brothers Realty and Eastern Consolidated in New York.

Birchstone Residential is led by President Tracey Whitson, who holds a Certified Apartment Manager designation. Her bio does not name her earlier employers. Birchstone has changed presidents twice: co-founding president David Deitz was named in company releases through 2023, and JoAnn Blaylock, formerly president of Lennar's Quarterra Living, was named president in May 2024. We found no announcement of when Whitson took over.

Rebecca Haag is Senior Vice President of Operations. Her bio says she came from a top 20 national multifamily firm, and business directories place her at Bell Partners from 2009, with earlier time at Lyon Apartment Companies. Amanda Otey is Vice President of Operations for the East Coast; directories list earlier regional roles at Bell Partners and Lincoln Property Company, and a manager role at Camden Property Trust. Austin Jones leads construction and facilities; directories list him earlier as a capital project manager at Dallas-based Tonti Properties. Savannah King directs systems.

In Texas, Regional Manager Noelle Bui oversees communities; she holds a Texas Apartment Association apartment manager certification and, per business directories, was a regional property manager at Slosburg Company and, before that, Village Green. Birchstone lists several other regional managers without naming their regions.

The earlier-employer details for Birchstone staff and for Danielle Jackson come from business contact directories, not from the firm, and could be out of date.

Ashcroft does not publish portfolio-wide occupancy, rent growth, expense or collections figures. What is public comes from the firm's own marketing, one rating-agency report on a securitized loan, and press coverage of investor updates.

On expenses, the firm has only spoken in general terms. In May 2023 it told investors that payroll and insurance costs were running ahead of its original projections. It blamed a tight job market for wages and industry-wide premium increases for insurance, and said other operating costs stayed close to or below budget. In late 2022 it said it underwrites expenses conservatively and that actual costs often come in lower, which it credits to Birchstone Residential's scale. It gave no figures to support either statement.

In late 2023, Ashcroft paused distributions in its first value-add fund and made a capital call, citing much higher costs to extend interest rate caps on floating-rate loans. It told investors the fund's properties still covered their debt payments, but that two Atlanta-area communities continued to underperform. The Real Deal linked that to bad debt and slow leasing in Atlanta. Its CEO also said selling the fund's properties at then-current prices would not return invested capital.

A 2023 DBRS Morningstar report on a securitized multi-property Ashcroft loan described a plan to renovate every unit inside and out. At that point most units had been renovated, and renovated units were earning rent premiums roughly in line with expectations.

The firm's own figures are more upbeat. It reports strong NOI growth across its exited deals and lists past sales with large valuation gains, mostly after two- to four-year holds. For one Florida community, it reports that lease renewals rose sharply after purchase and that new leases were signed above existing rents. It also says in-house bulk buying cuts renovation material costs and lets it renovate units in two to three weeks. None of these firm figures has been independently confirmed.

Ashcroft's published fee terms for its Value-Add Fund III list sponsor fees paid to Ashcroft: an acquisition fee, a disposition fee, a financing fee, an asset management fee and an administration fee. See the fund FAQ for the rates.

The same FAQ says the fund's properties are run only by Birchstone Residential, Ashcroft's in-house manager, but it does not state Birchstone's property management fee. No public information on that fee was found. Birchstone manages only Ashcroft-owned properties, so outside owners cannot hire it.

Birchstone Residential uses Entrata as its property management system. Its job postings, including a Dallas service manager role and an Irving leasing specialist role, ask for Entrata skills, and resident and prospect portals on its property websites run on Entrata's residentportal.com and prospectportal.com. Online applications go through Get100.

Leads also appear to stay inside Entrata. On the DFW property websites we checked, Exchange 7272 in Dallas and The Oaks at Valley Ranch in Irving, the schedule-a-tour button opens an Entrata guest card form. Entrata sells LeadManager as the CRM that tracks those guest cards. Neither the sites nor the job postings name LeadManager directly, and we found no sign of a separate leasing CRM such as Knock or Funnel.

For pricing, Ashcroft said in a September 2023 article on its own site that it uses AIRM, RealPage's AI Revenue Management software. The same article said the firm had put a chatbot on the website of one Georgia community and was testing an AI rent collection program that had not yet been rolled out across the portfolio. It did not name the chatbot or collections vendor. We found no later update on either tool.

In 2022 Birchstone adopted Opiniion, a resident feedback platform, and uses its automated responses to handle resident feedback. The announcement does not say how Opiniion connects to Entrata.

Ashcroft has an in-house business intelligence function led by a Director of Business Intelligence, and Birchstone has a Director of Systems. Neither bio names the tools used.

No public information on open APIs or an in-house data platform was found. The DFW property websites we could inspect show no chat or AI leasing widget. Although the firm has said it uses RealPage revenue software, Ashcroft and Birchstone do not appear among the named defendants in the RealPage rent-pricing cases we reviewed.