Chester County man is headed to prison for stealing $1.8 million from area homeowners associations
William Huyler III promoted himself as an experienced property manager. But he ultimately stole money from eight homeowners' associations in three states.
A Chester County man who admitted to embezzling nearly $2 million from homeowners associations throughout the region has been sentenced to three-to-10 years in prison.
William Huyler III, 42, received that sentence Thursday from county Judge Anne Marie Wheatcraft after pleading guilty in December to criminal charges including theft by deception, forgery, and tampering with records.
During that same hearing in West Chester, Huyler pleaded guilty to stealing $1.25 million in Small Business Administration loans, a crime detectives discovered this year while investigating his company, East Hill Property Management.
In addition to the prison time, Huyler was also ordered to serve 14 years of probation, and must reimburse the associations for the money he stole.
» READ MORE: Chester County man pleads guilty to bilking $1.8 million from homeowners associations across the region
Huyler’s attorney, Julia Alexa Rogers, did not return a request for comment.
In a statement, District Attorney Deborah Ryan said Huyler’s “callous greed” motivated the theft.
“In the process, employees of his company lost their jobs and had their reputations tarnished from the fallout,” she said. “But beyond the financial loss to the individual victims, he also stole their sense of trust — and sometimes that’s harder to get back.”
A resident of East Marlborough Township, Huyler promoted himself to prospective clients as an experienced property manager. His company was hired to manage the business accounts of eight homeowners associations in Montgomery and Chester Counties, as well as parts of South Jersey and Delaware.
Between January 2017 and January 2018, Huyler stole $1.8 million from these groups in what Ryan called a “complicated pyramid scheme,” commingling their money with his personal bank accounts. He hid the theft by moving funds among different associations’ bank accounts to obscure the withdrawals.
Huyler also forged bank statements, changed account names, and doctored books and records to create a “false impression that the [associations’] money was being maintained properly,” according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.
» READ MORE: Police say this man stole more than $1 million from suburban homeowners associations. Now, he faces new charges.
As investigators probed that scheme, they discovered in February that he had fraudulently applied for and received two Small Business Administration loans from the Wilmington Savings Fund Society in 2017.
In his application for the loans, Huyler used inaccurate documentation to falsely portray his company as profitable, when in fact he was in the middle of embezzling money from the homeowners’ associations, investigators said.