Fountain Valley Man Arrested on Charges of Victimizing 100 in Real Estate Fraud

A Fountain Valley builder and property manager has been arrested by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department on charges of engineering a multimillion-dollar real estate fraud with more than 100 victims.

John Walter Partridge, owner of Partridge Development, AAA Maintenance & Painting and four other firms housed at two Fountain Valley locations, was taken into custody earlier this week on a warrant charging him with nine counts of grand theft and four counts of equity purchase fraud, all felonies.

Partridge, 57, was released Thursday on $50,000 bail. In a brief telephone interview Friday, he denied the charges but declined additional comment on the advice of his attorney. According to sheriff’s fraud investigator Curt Hoopes, who spent six months preparing the case, Partridge acquired more than 100 residential properties in Orange County between July, 1985, and February, 1987, all from owners who were facing foreclosure actions.

Hoopes said Partridge would offer to take over the mortgage payments in order to save the owner from having a foreclosure on his credit record. In some cases, Hoopes said, Partridge paid a small sum to the property owner in exchange for title to the property. In other instances he executed a promissory note.

Then, Hoopes said, Partridge would rent out the property--usually to the original owner--and collect the monthly rent payments without making mortgage payments as he had promised.

In the end, the property would be foreclosed in an action filed against the original owner because the transfer of title to Partridge was never recorded, Hoopes said.

According to the Sheriff’s Department, the value of the properties acquired and then abandoned by Partridge topped $10 million. Hoopes declined to comment when asked how much Partridge had collected in rent payments. He said, however, that Partridge collected rents from some victims for as long as eight months.

A preliminary hearing on the charges has been scheduled for Friday in Central Municipal Court in Santa Ana.