AmCap buys suburban Chicago shopping center for $30M

Brian Kosoy’s Sterling Organization cashed in with the $30 million sale of a suburban Chicago shopping center, more than doubling what the company paid for it 10 years ago.

AmCap, the Connecticut investment firm run by Jay Kaiser, bought the 146,000-square-foot Hoffman Plaza in the northwest Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, according to public records. Clothing retailer Burlington and grocer Jewel Osco are its anchor tenants across about 50,000 square feet apiece.

All but 5,500 square feet of the property is also occupied and it includes a half-acre future development site for another potential storefront, according to a marketing flier.

The deal amounts to a cashout for Sterling, which bought the property for about $14 million in 2012 and spent money redeveloping the site to land Burlington as a tenant and add outbuildings. It’s unclear how much the firm paid for upgrades to the site, and it didn’t return a request for comment.

“Within the retail category, grocery has always been the most favored product type,” said CBRE’s Christian Williams, who brokered the deal on behalf of Sterling. “That continues to be the most stable of the retail formats.”

The health crisis has highlighted the value of neighborhood shopping centers, and investors have poured in more than $200 million into such assets so far this year in Cook County. New York’s Brixmor led the way by spending $161 million on three Chicago-area grocery-anchored shopping centers so far this year.

It’s AmCap’s fourth retail property in Chicago’s suburbs, according to its website. The company didn’t return a request for comment.

The properties have gained appeal in both the suburbs and the city, where a 66,000-square-foot South Loop property leased by the grocer Mariano’s sold in June for $52.4 million to California’s Realty Income. The seller was New York-based Melohn Properties.

“The market is active big-picture on retail because as we go through the pandemic you saw tremendous performance out of the grocers,” Williams said. “You saw weaker retailers, non-grocers, die off. As retailers have survived and thrived coming through the pandemic, people look at it and see it’s a limited healthy asset class.”

It’s also West Palm Beach-based Sterling’s second Jewel-anchored shopping center deal so far this year in the Chicago area. In March it bought a shopping center leased by the grocer for $18 million in the North Mayfair neighborhood.

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