Stay in touch
Sign up for our free newsletter, The Talegate
Vesta is the Roman goddess of hearth and home, while lack of heat and hot water in the home are just two in a startling list of tenant complaints for Vesta Realty, helmed by CEO Marc Kulick.
The company owns dozens of apartment properties across the region, including 13 in Tulsa. Local tenants who paid their complexes for utilities have received cutoff notices for water and trash and have reported ignored maintenance requests for mold, flooding, broken or missing appliances, pest infestations, and more. (Websites for most of the Tulsa properties as of this story, with some studio apartments starting at $759 and other “luxury” apartments starting at $1,500+, are still advertising move-in specials.)
Additionally, a number of lawsuits highlighted by KJRH name some of the other contractors, vendors, and lenders shorted millions of dollars in total. The TV station also reported recent foreclosure proceedings on multiple Vesta properties, with lawsuits by lender Fannie Mae claiming over $174 million in loan principal that has gone unpaid for months.
Online court dockets in Oklahoma naming Kulick as a defendant show a pattern of financial issues, from bogus checks in 2013 to a lawsuit from American Express claiming over $300,000 past due on a single card in his name. Multiple filings are also available via Kansas’ online case search, including a March suit filed by business partner Josef Loeffler that alleges “millions looted by Kulick through concealed payments of personal credit card balances, automobile loans, and apparently, gambling debts.”
As reported by Oklahoma Watch, Kulick is or has been a high-stakes poker player whose net winnings fell from $459,900 on January 27, 2025, to $20,600 by February 10 of that same year. The Loeffler lawsuit lists a $6,000 monthly salary for Kulick, with multiple local news outlets reporting he owns and resides in a $1.7 million home in Tulsa. As of April 28, there are no Kansas court documents available online for Loeffler’s lawsuit after the March 27 summons sent to Kulick, who had 30 days to respond or risk default judgment.
As all this reporting came to light, Kulick granted an on-camera interview to KJRH in January, during which he said he wasn’t aware of many of the tenant complaints and said coming “to corporate” with complaints may have solved property management issues. On April 22, KJRH reported that Vesta’s Shoreline Apartments’ water bill had been paid and spoke to Kulick, who promised back payment of water on another Tulsa property, and a city representative, who said Vesta often pays “at the last second.”
To zoom out: here we have a poker-playing landlord, in the middle of a housing crisis, deciding to give an interview on the subject of why his tenants are complaining about their water getting turned off.
Perhaps it’s worth noting that Vesta, the Roman goddess, was also the patron deity of bakers, in charge of not only keeping the home fires burning, but presiding over getting that bread. Kulick, who promised KJRH’s reporter he planned to “stay current on bills going forward,” may have to choose one or the other.
