Shayla Grant stands in the almost empty living room of a small white house packing up the last of her belongings and preparing to move.
She has been renting the home on Palos Street in West Price Hill from a company called Second Avenue for the last two years.
Her voice echoes around the space as she points out lumps on the wall above the fireplace and what appears to be faint black fuzz near where it meets the ceiling.
"I started seeing this little bubbling. It started out like this here," she says, pointing to some raised mounds on the beige wall. "So I thought, 'Well maybe there's water getting in there from the chimney.' And then it started growing that stuff," she says, pointing again to some more severe deformations on the wall and the darker spots near the ceiling.
The growth on the wall — along with rising rents and a sewage leak in the basementare big reasons she's moving her family out, Grant says.
She says she can't prove it, but she believes conditions here are connected to the respiratory issues she and her children have been having.
"We weren't sick like that before we moved in here," she says. "I was calling off once or twice a week because my kids were sick, even in the summertime."
'A dramatic shift'
The Grants aren't the first family to have complaints about sewage leaks and mold at this home.
In the years since the Great Recession, the house on Palos has passed from one investment company to another. Like many houses now rented out by large, out-of-town landlords, the ownership history of this house in the Hamilton County Auditor's records tells a broader story about the way housing has changed here.
A woman named Mary Jane Cooper lived in the house on Palos Street for forty years, most of them with her husband. She took out a mortgage on the property after he died. When she fell behind on the payments in 2010, the bank foreclosed.
Around that time, University of Cincinnati Real Estate Professor Gary Painter says a new housing investment model was emerging in which large investment firms bought up housing in places like Price Hill across the country.
"There has just been this dramatic shift to these sorts of arrangements in real estate that just didn't exist 20 years ago," Painter says. "Prior to the financial crisis, you just didn't see these as a dominant way that people held their assets in real estate."
Painter says the model has its upsides and downsides. It brings new capital for renovating housing into struggling markets. But it also offers much less transparency about who owns properties — and sometimes, it can also mean less accountability when those properties aren't kept up to municipal code.
When the bottom fell out on home values in communities like Price Hill during the recession, such companies were there to scoop up houses and apartment buildings for very low prices.
From owner-occupied to investment asset
That seems to be what happened to the house on Palos. An investment company called Harbour purchased it for $5,269 after Cooper's foreclosure, Hamilton County Recorder records show.
Harbour's business model was built around so-called land contract sales — a sort of rent-to-own deal for housing. Under these deals, tenants were responsible for all repairs and maintenance while they paid off the homes, often at high interest rates and for multiples of the price Harbour bought the houses for. If they missed a payment, they could be evicted, losing any funds they'd put into the house.
This business model was controversial. In 2018, the Pennsylvania Attorney General sued Harbour over its land contract model, calling it "deceptive and unfair." The lawsuit alleges Harbour bought more than 6,000 houses across the country to sell on land contract.
In West Price Hill, Harbour offered the Palos Street house to a tenant on a rent to own basis for $40,500 at 10 percent interest.
He lived there for eight years before Harbour sold off its interest in the house. The buyer, another investment company, foreclosed in early 2019, claiming in filings that the tenant had fallen behind on payments. The house was sold at auction. It appraised at $27,000.
That's when a company called Vinebrook came into the picture. It bought up more than 23,000 houses across the country, including about 3,100 in Hamilton County, earlier this decade. Many of those local houses were in Price Hill and surrounding west side neighborhoods.
Mold issues emerge at Palos
Shortly after Vinebrook bought the Palos house, Sarah McKeown moved in. It seemed perfect: just blocks from where she grew up. She was seven months pregnant at the time, and the house was close to her mom's.
About a year in, McKeown began noticing the same issues Shayla Grant would later face. The paint over her fireplace was bubbling up and something started growing on the wall. She reached out to Vinebrook.
"I think I'd submitted four or five maintenance requests before I got a response," she said. "They came and said, 'there's a leak in the roof and that's why there's biological growth on the wall. So we're going to repair your roof.' They repaired the roof and it continued to get worse."
City inspectors eventually confirmed mold in August, 2023. McKeown believes the mold caused her son to develop asthma so severe he's been admitted to the hospital multiple times. She also thinks it could explain his autoimmune disorder. Her family has pressed the Cincinnati Health Department and city councilmembers for more attention to the issue.
"When we heard the word 'asthma' we were shocked," McKeown says. "None of my siblings, none of us have ever had anything breathing-related or autoimmune."
At the same time the McKeowns were struggling with mold, Cincinnati was suing Vinebrook over conditions at multiple of its properties across the city. That lawsuit was settled last year.
WVXU reached out to Vinebrook for comment on conditions at the Palos house and efforts the company took to fix issues there, but did not get a response.
Vinebrook moved McKeown to another house it owns nearby in 2023. McKeown says the basement there also has a recurring sewage leak.
'It's just a revenue stream'
The same year McKeown moved, Vinebrook sold the Palos property and seven others to another real estate investment company called Second Avenue. In the years since, Vinebrook has sold hundreds of its Hamilton County properties as it wrangles with debt issues.
Code compliance records show the mold issue at Palos was abated to the city's satisfaction in November 2023. But Shayla Grant, the tenant who rented Palos under Second Avenue, said she was worried it had come back. The city sent Second Avenue notice it intends to conduct another inspection in early December.
Greater Cincinnati Legal Aid Attorney Nick DiNardo works with tenants on housing issues. He says Second Avenue has often been just a frustrating for renters as Vinebrook.
"They seem to be similarly bad at making repairs and communicating with tenants, those are the complaints we've been getting," he says. "Doing the same sort of Vinebrook-type model, it appears."
DiNardo says he believes many of the problems tenants face from these companies stem from the fact they're owned by out-of-town investors and managers who don't have a stake in the local community.
"It's become much more common for out-of-town investors to control properties, especially large portfolios of units," he says. "We see that a lot, where it's just a revenue stream. What happens is there's all kinds of deferred maintenance and tenant requests and tenant communication just aren't dealt with."
Painter, the UC real estate professor, says there isn't a lot of data showing whether tenant conditions are better or worse under out-of-town landlords. But he says there are studies showing that smaller landlords tend to focus more on the long term, pay more attention to tenant conditions and invest more in the maintenance of their properties.
"What we do know is that there are differences in behaviors between people who own one or two or three properties, and those who own twenty, and those who own a hundred or more," he says. "Those who own a hundred or more, they're really about, 'Let's make the most money here.' "
Ongoing legal fights
The city and a group of renters are suing Second Avenue over conditions at its properties and some of its business practices.
The house on Palos isn't involved in that lawsuit, but another house Second Avenue bought from Vinebrook a couple miles away is. Filings made as part of the lawsuit allege the family living at that house went without a bathroom, hot water and drinking water access for two weeks due to a sewage leak there.
"My three children and I were forced to leave 1181 Morado prior to the expiration of our tenancy because of chronic and dangerous conditions at the house and late fees imposed by Second Avenue," a filing from the former tenant says. "I am now experiencing homelessness."
The lawsuit against Second Avenue is ongoing. The company did take steps earlier this year to change certain portions of its leases that the lawsuit says aren't legal in Ohio. It also issued refunds to tenants who paid more in late fees than the company is allowed to charge. Shayla Grant, the most recent resident of the Palos house, says she received money as part of that effort by Second Avenue.
'Complaint is baseless'
WVXU reached out to a Second Avenue attorney seeking comment but didn't hear back from the company. In court filings around the lawsuit, it has defended its business practices.
"Over the last two years, more than 140 residents have renewed their leases with Second Avenue at a rate of over 70%," one filing reads. "The renewal rate in August 2025 (when Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit) was over 90%. The Cincinnati Housing Authority also recently recognized Second Avenue’s contributions to the community by awarding it the 2024 Landlord Appreciation award. Finally, the average rating from Hamilton County residents for a maintenance call using Second Avenue’s residential portal application consistently has exceeded 4.6 out of 5.0 stars. In short, the facts will show that the sensationalized complaint is baseless."
WVXU spoke to more than a dozen Second Avenue tenants earlier this year. Some reported good experiences with the company. But others complained of sewage leaks, respiratory issues they suspected were caused by HVAC issues or mold and other severe problems.
Most of those houses weren't purchased from Vinebrook. Instead, the bulk of Second Avenue's Hamilton County portfolio seems to come from an entity called JKV LLC. That LLC is connected to a real estate investment company whose owner, John Kralik, was the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation alleging he misused roughly $1.6 million of investors' money on personal expenses like a luxury car. That case was settled Dec. 10. It's unclear if any of the company's Cincinnati properties were involved in the allegations.
Second Avenue still owns the house on Palos, though it's vacant for now. Grant has moved on to her own house. She says she won't rent from a large landlord again.
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