Evergreen Capital promises 10% returns backed by residential real estate loans, but the venture arrives amid rising concerns about investor-driven housing costs in Central Kentucky LEXINGTON, Ky. — The founders of one of Central Kentucky’s most prolific home-buying operations are making a pla y for Wall Street-style capital — this time asking accredited investors to bankroll the very deals that have fueled the company’s rapid growth. Joseph Back and Eric Martin, the co-founders of Rapid Fire Home Buyers, announced the launch of Evergreen Capital Fund LLC on Sunday, a private real estate income fund structured under SEC Rule 506(c). The fund targets $10 million in capital from accredited investors and promises a 10% annualized return paid in quarterly distributions, with a $50,000 minimum investment and a 12-month lock-up period. The pitch: investors contribute capital to the fund, which then makes short-term, first-lien mortgage loans to residential real estate operators — including Rapid Fire itself — at interest rates of 12% to 13% plus origination points. Evergreen’s profit comes from the spread between what it charges borrowers and what it pays investors. A page from Evergreen’s pitch deck describes their business model. (Evergreen Capital) “This isn’t about speculation or chasing the next hot trend,” Back and Martin wrote in an email blast sent to their contact list Sunday morning. The email, sent from Rapid Fire’s marketing account, described the fund as focused on “clarity, conservative strategy, and predictable income.” From Wholesaling to Lending Rapid Fire Home Buyers has become one of the largest “we buy houses” operations in the region since Back founded the company in 2019. Martin, a University of Kentucky finance graduate, joined as chief operating officer after relocating from Alabama in 2020. The company now operates five offices spanning Lexington, Louisville, Cincinnati, Montgomery, Alabama, and Columbus, Georgia, with 43 full-time employees. The firm has completed more than 2,000 transactions and was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in both 2024 and 2025, ranking No. 561 nationally and No. 11 in real estate in its debut year. Rapid Fire reported revenue of $8.6 million in 2025, up from $676,660 in its first year of operations, representing what the company calls a compounded average growth rate of 66.2% annually. It holds an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau. In January 2025, Rapid Fire made a strategic pivot from pure wholesaling — the practice of placing properties under contract and assigning them to end-buyers for a fee — to selectively flipping houses. That shift created a need for acquisition and renovation capital that quickly outstripped the company’s network of local private lenders. “As the pipeline has grown, we have tapped most of these local lenders,” the company’s offering memorandum states. “This has led to having to use institutional hard money lending companies who are expensive, slow, and heavy with fees. Evergreen fills this gap.” According to the fund’s materials, Rapid Fire has already borrowed nearly $3 million across 17 flip projects from various entities, with an average profit per deal of $34,000 — roughly double the firm’s average wholesale deal margin. Fund Structure and Risk Factors Evergreen Capital is managed by Evergreen Capital LLC, a separate entity controlled by Back and Martin. The fund’s underwriting guidelines cap loan amounts at 75% of a property’s after-repair value, require first-position liens, and mandate that borrowers have prior deal experience and credit scores above 680. Loan terms run six months with a possible extension to 12. The offering memorandum includes standard private placement disclaimers noting that the investment involves risk and that past performance is not indicative of future results. Forward-looking statements throughout the materials carry the usual caveats. For investors seeking liquidity, the fund requires a 12-month lock-up from the date of investment, followed by 90 days’ written notice for redemption requests. Principal is then returned in four equal quarterly installments, and an annual cap limits total redemptions to 10% of fund equity per year. The company says it aims to return capital within roughly six months of a request, though the formal process outlined in the private placement memorandum allows for longer timelines. Martin holds a Certified Private Lender Associate designation from the American Association of Private Lenders. The fund’s legal counsel is Forta Law, which the offering describes as the largest private-lending-focused law firm in the country. Bookkeeping is handled by Real Books CPA, and loan origination runs through Lendr, a third-party software platform. A Familiar Tension in the Housing Market The fund’s launch arrives at a fraught moment for Central Kentucky’s housing market. Median home prices in Fayette County rose 3% to $340,000 in 2025, according to Bluegrass Realtors data, and the region’s total sales volume exceeded $4 billion through November. Lexington’s median home price has climbed roughly 57% since 2019, and an affordable housing needs assessment published last year found that a household earning $75,000 can now afford only about 21% of listings in the city — down from 48% before the pandemic. Investor activity is a growing factor. According to the National Association of Realtors, 18% of home sales in Lexington last year were made by investors, exceeding the national average. A June 2025 LEX 18 investigation found that private companies owning residential properties through LLCs were limiting affordable housing supply in Central Kentucky, with some homes purchased by entities for as little as $36,000 later reselling for six figures. Fayette County Property Valuation Administrator David O’Neill drew attention to the pattern in a widely shared social media post, urging the public to examine who was buying properties at the lowest price points. “This is where the tension really becomes clear, especially since institutions, like cash-offering buyers, often win bidding wars, leaving families relying on traditional financing sidelined,” Nadia Evangelou, a senior economist with the National Association of Realtors, told LEX 18 at the time. Rapid Fire has operated in this ecosystem as one of the area’s highest-volume cash buyers, marketing itself as a solution for homeowners facing foreclosure, inherited properties, or homes in disrepair. The company’s website states it purchases houses “as-is” and can close in as few as seven days. Consumer reviews are generally positive. But the wholesale and flip model — in which properties are purchased below market value and resold, sometimes within weeks — has drawn broader criticism from housing advocates who argue the practice contributes to affordability pressures by channeling starter-home inventory toward investors rather than owner-occupants. Cash-home-buying companies typically offer between 30% and 70% of a property’s fair market value, according to industry analyses from HomeLight and Houzeo, though outcomes vary. Scaling Up In the Evergreen offering memorandum, Back and Martin are transparent about the fund’s growth trajectory. After initially lending to Rapid Fire’s own flip projects, the plan is to expand lending to the company’s wholesale buyer database, which the memorandum says includes more than 6,000 real estate professionals and grows by 50 to 100 new investors each month. The founders frame this as a competitive advantage: most hard-money lenders lack a built-in pipeline of vetted borrowers, while Evergreen can draw from a pool of buyers who have already transacted with Rapid Fire across five markets. Whether investors will find the proposition compelling may depend on their appetite for illiquid, niche real estate debt in a market where conventional savings yields remain elevated. High-yield savings accounts currently offer returns in the 4% to 5% range with full FDIC insurance and daily liquidity — protections that a private fund structured as an LLC cannot match. The 10% target, while roughly double the risk-free rate, carries the idiosyncratic risks of a small, newly formed lending operation concentrated in a handful of Southeastern and Midwestern markets. For Lexington’s housing market, the fund represents a formalization of the capital flows that have already reshaped the landscape. What was once a patchwork of individual private lenders backing local fix-and-flip deals could now be a professionally managed pool of investor dollars, channeling outside capital into the same starter-home inventory that housing advocates say is increasingly out of reach for working families. Lexington for Everyone, a local organization pushing for more affordable housing, warned in January that the city could face a shortage of 30,000 affordable housing units by 2030. Kentucky lawmakers have begun exploring reforms, including proposals to ban large investors from purchasing single-family homes — a measure that echoes federal proposals floated in recent years. 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