The end of LCAP

[GammaZeta]

As Brothers of Lambda Chi Alpha, we are held to a higher standard, to obtain higher ideals..........

..........except for our leaders.

[GammaZeta]

I just also wanted to bring up an old point of mine, why do we INSIST on hiring for positions in our fraternity EXCLUSIVELY to brothers of our fraternity.

Why the hell were the leaders of LCAP put into the positions in the FIRST place?

No property experience.

No real estate experience.

No construction experience.

No legal experience.

No landlord experience.

Would you hand over the keys to your BRAND NEW, $120,000 Porsche to a 15 year old student driver? NO!

Then why the HELL would we hand over management to someone who had NO EXPERIENCE managing a national property portfolio?

Plain and simple, we don't always NEED to hire within the fraternity for eveyr position, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE NOT QUALIFIED!

If we simply would have hired a national property management firm, with open books, we would not be in this cluster fuck.

[boz130]

Since I started my alumni communications firm in '01, I've been licensed by a number of GLOs (LCA & 14 others, both NIC & NPC). Just for the sake of research, tonight I went through each of their web sites to see how many offer housing programs like LCAP. Here's the breakdown (keep in mind that I'm not a financial whiz):

NIC groups - 3 yes, 9 no (I marked LCA as a "no")

NPC groups - 1 yes, 2 no

On a percentage basis, this extrapolates out to around only 25% of all GLOs. That tells me that this sort of operation's not terribly popular. This also begs the question: what are the 4 GLOs w/housing programs doing that the others aren't?

In ZAX,
BF

[lenoxxx]

Im no financial real estate whiz myself, however to answer your question Bill- some of the things done at Shippensburg made absolutely no sense at all. At one point in 2004 the local alumni asked for a change in leasing and billing that would have taken a slight change in the lease and wording that might have taken 30 minutes to change and review that would have lowered the monthly billing, but made it a 12 month lease as opposed toa 9 month lease that would have made the renters happier, closed a loophole of summer living (all the kids lived there for free anyway) and made the house more rentable- AND WOULD HAVE INCREASED REVENUE 15-20%.

We were told that this was too much work to do, and not how they ran things.

Also leases were never sent to us until december, despite asking many times to up this into august so we could rent and lease more effectively-

We were told that this was too much work to do, and not how they ran things.

At one point a student failed out, and called LCAP to be let out of his responsibilities- and was told "ok", until the local alumni called and reamed out the staff member who approved this, and the offer was revoked.

We were told this was a misunderstanding.

This all goes beyond not having massive real estate knowledge to having zero common sense.

In fact we were also told that the Shippensburg house was actually one of the few MAKING MONEY for LCAP. And now the house is for sale, with no buyers, and get this.... no renters for next year. That's right no renters for next year. After the surprise "we're selling" announcement we told LCAP you would not be able to get renters if we told the kids to move out in NOV of 2008. Several of us got an email in MAY of 2008 asking for help in contacting the chapter to look for 8-10 renters?!?

So now the alumni investment is totally gone, the house will probably sit empty and vandalized in the next few months, and will generate no income and be sold for next to nothing.

Nice

[GammaZeta]

"This all goes beyond not having massive real estate knowledge to having zero common sense."

That's even scarier...

[GammaZeta]

OPEN THE BOOKS! OPEN THE BOOKS! OPEN THE BOOKS!

[Tom Earp]

Excuse me.

I guess since I do not post to somes expectations I won't anymore.

If some cannot understand the gist of my postings, then I must be in error.

My typoing and writing style are mine alone and none others. Some will call it Earp Speak.

So, lets place the emphasis on the problem first and foremost.

Yes, there was and still is a problem and I find it interesting that the comments of Larry Brinkley a past member of the GHZ was very important.

IHQ has been placed in a position to act like a business which was done done under previous Executive Director.

But in my disjointed idea and what I asked and expected of MY IHQ I don't, I still feel that others have been left out in the cold!

I made my recommendation and while it may not have any effect, it is still my advice only and I am tired of seeing Zetas getting screwed as much

So, maybe, this being an open site as has been said some will see it and feel the pain we are feeling.

This Shit should be taken care of for the Zetas in one form or another!

IHQ has a responsibilty to do it instead of leaving them high and dry!

Oh, lenoxx, just my ranting and ravings!

[GammaZeta]

Tom's right.

HQ does have a responsibility

We need to look at this in two ways: a short term probelm and a long term probelm.

Short term - how do we handle the current crisis, get our brothers housing, and not throw away people's hard work.

Long term - how do we prevent this type of issue from rising again? Maybe HQ needs to be more open with the financials. Quarterly, or semi-annual financial reports to the membership.

[lxa29]

This is a sad occurence for our chapters who now face a tough problem with figuring out how to financially sustain their houses. However, I don't think there is an easy answer for this. Something has to be done and wether i like the outcome or not I think our HQ is doing the best it can given the circumstances. I read some of these posts and to me it almost paints a picture a bunch of evil people in Indy who are out to make a buck and screw all of our brothers over, which i know is not true. Tough choices have to be made, unfortunate mistakes have occurred in the past, but they are doing whats best for the fraternity as a whole, please try and keep that in mind. Wether you agree with the outcome or not, I am pretty sure alot of thought and attention went into the desicion to get rid of LCAP.

"Its easy to shout from the back of the bus when your not in the drivers seat."

[Tom Earp]

Originally Posted by lxa29

This is a sad occurence for our chapters who now face a tough problem with figuring out how to financially sustain their houses. However, I don't think there is an easy answer for this. Something has to be done and wether i like the outcome or not I think our HQ is doing the best it can given the circumstances. I read some of these posts and to me it almost paints a picture a bunch of evil people in Indy who are out to make a buck and screw all of our brothers over, which i know is not true. Tough choices have to be made, unfortunate mistakes have occurred in the past, but they are doing whats best for the fraternity as a whole, please try and keep that in mind. Wether you agree with the outcome or not, I am pretty sure alot of thought and attention went into the desicion to get rid of LCAP.

"Its easy to shout from the back of the bus when your not in the drivers seat."

Okay LXA29, I can agree to disagree on some points you made.

Yes, I learned over a period of time that while LCAP seemed to be a great idea it turned out to be a big mess.

Yes, there is a new group in place at IHQ that I have more respect for than I have had for a very long time. I have worked with them and seen what they have done to cut back expenses and get us back in line so there can be expansion of either new colonies or going back to those closed over the years. Bill and Biff both explained that was this they felt was the best effort and a two pronged attack which makes sense.

I am not really sure how many houses are in jepordy of being lost as that has not been reported to my knowledge. We only know of a few that we have seen on here, but they could be still a major part of LXA.

It has and still my proposal tht they while act as landlords, the payments come to them to keep paying off the mortgages until at the time a Alumni group and take them over. Not just try to seel the houses back at inflated prices that were beyond their control.

As GammaZeta pointed out there seemed to be little oversight from what I have seen and heard.

One of the jewells was at the Un. Ak which the Zeta now owns again.

But, what of the others?

Am I soured over this, yes I am and I still feel that more could be done to keep those Zetas alive and in house.

[lenoxxx]

lxa29;

Im glad you now feel ok about what is being done with LCAP- because you are sure people "put alot of time into it". We all assumed that when it started and were basically "sold up the river".

The facts are that the liquidation plan was handled poorly, and continues to be handled poorly with all of the evidence at hand. Your blind faith in this is exactly why is got so out of control in the first place. I was willing to give the new folks a clean slate, however, when they put the house up for sale with no buyers ready to go, and told the renters to move on, and now there will be an empty or near empty house, and have started asking our alumni for help to fill it after they were told that would not work and blindsiding us with selling the property in the first place with no plan.

That story needs told

[GammaZeta]

Some major flaws in your thinking:

"Tough choices have to be made, unfortunate mistakes have occurred in the past, but they are doing whats best for the fraternity as a whole,"

Unfortunate MISTAKES? Is it a MISTAKE when your property organization has no one with any experience in charge and is LOOSING THOUSANDS of dollars on a monthly basis? That's not a mistake. Something is seriously wrong with that.

They're doing what's best for the fraternity as a hole? Even better idea. Hire someone who is competent and not just a BUDDY from the fraternity to run the damn thing.

Don't give me this bullshit of "oh, we made a mistake in the past but now we're trying to fix it".

Seems like this happens every couple of years, doesn't it? DOESN'T IT?

Quit the patronage, quit hiring exclusively from within the fraternity, quit throwing our money down the drain. Those aren't mistakes, that's incompetence.

WE DON'T LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES, PERIOD.

That's how we are always ending up in this situation. It was the mid 90's, then the late 90's, then the early 00's, and now it's 08.

"HQ is doing the best it can given the circumstances"

Maybe if HQ actually did something YEARS ago, they wouldn't be in this "circumstance". Maybe if they didn't get themselves into this mess.

What I want to know is, WHO is accountable and WHAT we will do in the future to prevent this from happening again.

I'll tell you what:

QUARTERLY REPORTS OF OUR ENTIRE FINANCIAL STATUS MAILED TO EACH CHAPTER AND ALUMNI ORGANIZATION...

Every three or four years we take another financial hit.

Let's find out where the money is going. Let's find out where it is spent. It's time we hold HQ responsible.

[GammaZeta]

Your blind faith in this is exactly why is got so out of control in the first place.

AMEN!!!!!!!! That's what I've been saying the past 4 years.

Ask questions....demand answers.

[JonoBN41]

Originally Posted by GammaZeta

Seems like this happens every couple of years, doesn't it? DOESN'T IT?

I'm right here. You don't have to scream.

[lenoxxx]

Another bit of shameful reporting from the LCAP newsfront... from the C&C website. I found the title of the article very very true.


Brothers When Convenient

July 2nd, 2008 by Joe Manzella. Popularity: 4%.
Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Service & Stewardship, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. These are the core values of the new True Brother Initiative - something I wish we started long ago - to better capture the meaning of brotherhood and to better live it as brothers.

At the same time our fraternity is moving toward a very idealistic and hopeful future (read:hope for the future), some of national’s actions are setting us back years.

In late 2007, as I headed my first few meetings as the proud High Alpha at Gamma Omicron Zeta (Michigan State), I sat at the helm of a chapter responsible for raising over $30,000 for cancer with our Greek Week team the year prior, one of the few chapters with zealously dry recruitment, a Chapter that initiated a local pastor as an honorary, a chapter that took home more than half of all awards handed out in the greek community for the past 2 years - we have 26 fraternities.

So, you can see my surprise when I heard that LCAP was divesting itself of our property because they were ‘losing money’ on the chapter and that membership was ‘weak’. AND that the alumni would be responsible for making an offer by April 1st and close on the house by July 1st.

What?

They want us to start a housing corps, do fundraising, and have a loan ready by April?

There’s more…

They are holding us liable for past ‘losses’. A property with a reasonable value of around $400,000 could be OUR cess-pit again for $806,000! Thanks LCAP! I was quite astounded by the large amount of losses, i wondered how they could have gotten a loan on the property with that kind of negative cash flow, and then they showed us their books… the past 3 years worth, because they don’t keep any more than that. They were calculating ‘depreciation’ with their losses. So a year they take in roughly $13,000 positive cash flow, the house ‘lost’ $30,000 in value, so that year they lost $17,000 on the property.

With a wild fundraising drive and a sizeable loan, this chapter may be able to purchase this property, but anything more than $500,000 will put us back in the territory that LCAP has well tread: overspending ourselves.

A quick recap:

-Chapter was weak in the early 1990s

-Lambda Chi Alpha took it over in 1993

-LCAP in 1997-ish

-2004 LCAP pulls out a balloon loan, joining millions of other idiots that spent more than they could afford over the next few years and wound up defaulting on a loan they should never have qualified for

-2007 LCAP gives the alumni a 6-month ultimatum to buy the house or have it sold out from under them.

With me so far? Here is the rest:

I called the house a cess-pit earlier, maybe that is not fair, so I’ll let you judge for yourself. Would you buy a 26-bedroom house with no functioning kitchen, a basement that floods because of the parking lot slope, 2 functioning toilets(of 6) and 4 functioning showers (of 7)? Still interested? How about if I ask you to pay $300-400,000 over value because you would be a bad brother to burden the fraternity by paying a fair value on the house? Still having trouble justifying that?

LCAP has put a price on brotherhood, and that price here at MSU is $306,000. They hired a real-estate law henchman to head the discussions and forced our alumni to spend thousands of dollars in consulting and lawyer fees before the sale even became feasible, just because they would not be up front with their finances.

This past month, our chapter presented legislation to the fraternity through the General Assembly, essentially asking that the general fraternity vote to require LCAP to sell the property to us for a fair value of $506,000 with a promise that we do $200,000 in renovations within the first year. This is fair, and does not penalize us for LCAP’s failure nor doom us to the same fate with a huge loan. We were just made aware that our resolution would not be heard on the floor of the general assembly because it would jeopardize the ’seperate’ relationship of Lambda Chi Alpha and LCAP (all board members are brothers, btw).

We are being called bad brothers because paying a fair value would hurt the fraternity, BUT we cannot use legal means to enforce fairness because LCAP isn’t part of the fraternity.

What does all of this mean?

Brothers When Convenient.

Gamma Omicron Zeta started in 1907 as the Forensic Literary Society, was Chartered in 1922, was one of the few fraternities to experience a merger on campus with Theta Kappa Nu in 1939, and depending on how this house sale goes, may have its last year of existence in 2009. In the past 4 years our membership has bounced almost cyclically between 55-81. Right now we are at 51 pre-rush, with 35 of those guys living in the house and ready to recruit. This chapter has been the focal point for inter-zeta relations since I first started college in 2004 and especially after the 2008 conclave, and losing this chapter will lose much of the connections that our zeta started within the State of Michigan and Great Lakes Conclave. We, in our hour of greatest need, have worked very hard to build the chapter into something we can be proud of, and the fraternity as a result of its own failure is turning their back on us.

So, I leave you with these few words: Always trust your brother. If he breaks your trust, rebuke him. If he asks forgiveness, forgive him. If he breaks he breaks your trust again, he was never a brother in the first place.

“Those who know the true meaning of brotherhood must practice it” - Harry S. Truman.