Three troubled apartment buildings in Grand Center will soon be under new management.
Residents of the Coronado Place & Towers say they have lived without consistent heat, hot water, air conditioning and working elevators while under the care of Cardinal Group Management. Certain advertised amenities, such as a rooftop pool, have also been unavailable to residents in recent years.
Denver-based Cardinal Group oversaw the buildings on Lindell Boulevard for Mapletree Investments, a massive real estate company headquartered in Singapore with properties in Asia, Australia and Europe, in addition to the U.S.
But that relationship is no more. After a Riverfront Times cover story detailed residents’ claims of substandard living conditions in September, sources say Cardinal Group no longer manages the Coronado Place & Towers.
It’s unclear who severed ties with whom, or whether the two companies will cease working together at Mapletree’s other Cardinal-managed properties across the U.S. But in St. Louis, the two companies’ working relationship is definitely through. Both Mapletree and Cardinal Group confirmed the Coronado split in separate statements to the RFT.
According to Cardinal Group, a different company will take over next week.
"Cardinal Group is assisting the property owner of Coronado Place & Towers with the transition to a new management company, with a transition effective date of November 15,” a statement from the company reads.
Greystar appears to be the company taking the reins. The property management company has several job listings for roles at the Coronado Place & Towers on its website.
“Mapletree’s focus is to provide all residents at Coronado Place & Towers a safe and conducive place to stay,” Mapletree said in a statement. “That includes to change the property manager and other adjustments to the building’s operations and maintenance.”
Cortney Harper, who lives in Lindell West (which residents told the RFT has been the most neglected building of Coronado Place & Towers), says representatives of Mapletree visited the property in recent weeks.
“They were going around asking if there was anything they could do better,” Harper says.
Cardinal Group and Mapletree Investments have both been sued multiple times by tenants in apartment buildings across the country. In 2021, a class action lawsuit filed in Denver alleged residents of an apartment complex there endured bug infestations, faulty elevators, lack of air conditioning and malfunctioning door locks.
In St. Louis, suits filed against Cardinal Group and Lindell Lofts LLC, which public records indicate is a subsidiary of Mapletree, all make similar allegations — that tenants deal with mold, broken equipment or unusable facilities, broken elevators, shoddy maintenance and “uninhabitable” units.
The most recent lawsuit from a tenant of the Coronado Place & Towers was filed in St. Louis Circuit Court in October. It alleges the tenant lived without adequate heat last winter or a working lock on her door.
In May, according to the suit, the unit’s air conditioning didn’t work. So staff installed a window unit using “duct tape and cardboard.” Rain eventually created a hole in the cardboard, and the hole grew until it was “substantial enough to bring in heat and a significant draft on cold nights. The air conditioning and heat were never fixed despite numerous attempts to reach staff, the suit alleges. Cardinal Group also never delivered on a promise of a $600 gift card in exchange for the tenant to renew her lease.
“Cardinal Management, in my opinion, is not a legitimate property management company — they’re a criminal enterprise,” the tenant’s lawyer, Al Johnson, tells the RFT.
Johnson also represented a couple who moved from Canada to an allegedly uninhabitable apartment in the Coronado Place & Towers in 2021. The couple reached a settlement this year for an amount Johnson would not disclose.
“I can’t believe that any legitimate owner would not know how bad this property is and put the money into it and fix it up,” Johnson says. “If they were really acting in good faith, what they’d do is stop making promises to people and immediately do rent abatement so people aren’t paying $1,000 a month for apartments that aren’t even habitable.”
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