Robynne Alexander, the failed New Hampshire developer charged last week by state and federal regulators with fraud, liked to use this tagline in promoting her real estate ventures: “We solve problems for profit.”

While her best-known real estate bust is the failed Laconia State School redevelopment project, she has other broken projects in her wake, two on Elm Street in Manchester, both cited by regulators in their charges against Alexander.

The state Bureau of Securities Regulation within the Secretary of State’s office has a consent order with Alexander in which she admits to commingling funds between real estate projects and misusing investments meant for a specific project to pay out other, unrelated investors.

Additionally, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged her with defrauding investors through real estate investment schemes resulting in investor losses of at least $3 million between 2018 through 2024.

The 63-year-old, identified as a Manchester resident, has admitted to the charges in a plea deal and will be sentenced in federal court in Concord later this summer.

Alexander is best known, because of the media attention, for her association with the Laconia State School, the 217-acre property that has been ripe for redevelopment, located between two lakes and next to a state park.

In 2021, when the state put the project to bid, Alexander emerged as the winning developer, a surprising choice given the scale of her projects had been much smaller than what was envisioned for the sprawling state-owned property. After several well-publicized starts and stops, she backed out of her $21.5 million offer after financing fell through.

The contract for the Laconia project ultimately went to Pillsbury Realty Development, which is in the early stages of developing proposed 2,050 residential units, commercial space and recreational areas, including a wellness district, retail and medical space, and a potential grocery store.

The SEC cited what it called Alexander’s “misrepresentations and deceptive conduct” in its complaint filed June 26 in U.S. District Court.

The SEC filing details how Alexander used other people’s money, purportedly as investments in certain real estate projects, to finance other deals, even using the money for herself to buy groceries and personal travel to “Paris, Barcelona, Valencia, Nassau, Florida and New Orleans in October and November 2023.”

Lesser-known deals also left promised projects — and promised investment returns — unfilled.

Alexander trumpeted her involvement in the two Elm Street properties in an interview with this writer for the 2022 edition of Greater Manchester Chamber magazine.

One project — Signature on Elm at 1211 & 1217 Elm Street in Manchester — was created to develop 35 apartments and commercial/retail space. It involved the reuse and rehabilitation of properties that included the former Lemay Brothers Jewelers and Raxx Billiards. It was completed without Alexander’s involvement.

Another at 4 Elm Street was meant to transform a former Catholic school into 29 apartments. It never happened.

In the 2021 interview for the chamber magazine, Alexander said as a developer she had a dual mission: “Provide well-built, safe apartment homes that residents can take pride in at affordable prices. Our tagline is: We solve problems for profit.”

She said she accomplished this through “value add and reuse projects.”

“We like to preserve the connection to the past and that’s one of the reasons why we like to do the adaptive reuse as opposed to bulldoze it and create something brand new,” she said at the time.

She created Raxx-LeMay LLC and partnered with North and South Construction Services to carry out the Signature on Elm project. It was ultimately completed by North and South without Alexander’s involvement, cutting the ribbon in January 2024 on 35 apartments, 15 of which were set aside as workforce housing, as well as 8,000 square feet of retail space.

None of the investors were identified by name in the SEC court filing.

With regard to Signature on Elm, the SEC said Alexander was “removed by two investors in the project who are the current principals of Signature on Elm, LLC.” The complaint said Alexander “misused at least $820,000 of Raxx-LeMay investor money for purposes that had nothing to do with acquiring and renovating the two properties.”

As Four on Elm LLC, Alexander planned the redevelopment of the Catholic school built in 1950 at 4 Elm Street and run by the Blessed Sacrament Church. After the school closed in 1975, it was bought and sold by various entities, eventually by the American Canadian Genealogical Society in December 1993 for $42,300.

Four on Elm LLC bought the property for $599,000 in December 2019 for development into rental units, but couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments, and the redevelopment project was scuttled when the property was foreclosed on in December 2023.

The SEC complaint said that while taking investment money purportedly for 4 Elm Street, she created another entity — Elm and Baker LLC — and funneled investor money there and used it as “numerous ‘loans’ to herself or other business entities, and personal expenses such as grocery bills.”

The Catholic Archdiocese in Manchester bought the property back in auction in April 2023 for $950,000. City assessment records show the diocese is still the owner of the property. It said in a statement at the time of the auction purchase that it was “working with Blessed Sacrament Parish to determine the future use for the building consistent with the charitable tradition of the parish.”

A fourth failed promise in the SEC filing is related to property in Hampton at 9G Street.

She created HB9G LLC to purchase, renovate and sell a multi-family unit building, receiving a total of $273,000 from three investors in exchange for membership interests in HB9G, according to the SEC.

Again, the SEC said, money from investors was used by Alexander for purposes other than the 9G Street project.

The property is now owned by Hampton G Street LLC, purchased from HB9G in October 2023 for $745,000, according to Hampton assessment records.

“Even though Alexander told investors she would renovate and sell the property, the property was not renovated and went into foreclosure in November 2023,” said the SEC. “Investors were not notified of the foreclosure which rendered their investments worthless.”

In its media statement, the state Bureau of Securities Regulation said it has ordered Alexander to cease and desist from offering or selling securities in New Hampshire. She is also barred from holding any securities licensure in New Hampshire and must pay $96,730.06 in restitution to the victims.

Her Loopnet.com profile says Alexander spent 22 years in the electrical engineering field. “Eight years were spent as an International Marketing and Product Manager negotiating with C-Level executives at Qualcomm, General Instrument, Kyocera, Ford, Medtronic, Sony and the like to facilitate global implementation of Design and Manufacturing software,” it says. “In 2002 she began working in real estate full-time as an agent then as a Broker. Robynne did her first ‘fix and flip’ in 1993.”

In that interview with this writer, Alexander talked about her philosophy of redevelopment, how she preferred what she called “adaptive reuse.”

“We work with the community, meaning we go to the city and we say: What is it that you need? This is what we have under contract. How can we marry what you need with what we have and still be able to make it a win-win for the community and for us,” she said.

She described herself in that interview as “a different kind of developer,” less focused on profit, she said, and more focused on using development to address the needs and strengthen the community. She cited development impact fees, one-time charges levied by local governments on new developments to help fund the cost of infrastructure and public services necessitated by that development.

“I’m a very different type of developer because most of them are for profit, and they don’t care about anything else, but the profit. Yeah. And they will take shortcuts, they will ask for no impact fees,” she said.

“So if you’re not paying impact fees, and you’re a developer and you are for profit, you have just taken money out of the coffers of the school system, which we’re trying to improve,” she added. “So why should you as a developer profit and not participate in the strength of the community? I’ve kind of made some of the people mad because I’m a very different type of developer because I am community focused. I put my money where my mouth is.”

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