Receiver named for condos near O’Hare Airport

A Cook County judge named a receiver to take over 185 condominiums in a Northwest Side housing complex that never rebounded from the market’s collapse 15 years ago.

A venture led by Chicago architect Guido Neri has been stuck with the condos at the 498-unit Catherine Courts Condominiums, just east of O’Hare International Airport, Crain’s reported. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019.

The venture paid $48.4 million for the complex in 2005, when it was a rental property and launched a condo conversion. The four-building complex, on North Cumberland Avenue just south of the Kennedy Expressway, is one of the few in the city that has both apartments and condos.

The venture, which had multiple disputes with the property’s condo association before filing Chapter 11, also owed its lender, Parkway Bank, more than $14 million. A judge approved the venture’s request to sell the condos to pay off the debt in September 2020. Efforts to sell the units failed and, in January 2021, the judge dismissed the bankruptcy case.

Parkway filed to foreclose on the condos in June, saying the Neri venture had defaulted on its loan. While the bank would have multiple steps to take, it could end up seizing the units through foreclosure and selling them to another investor.

Cook County Judge Marian Perkins named local real estate executive Daniel Hyman as the receiver. Hyman, president of Chicago’s Millennium Properties, will manage the property and its accounts until the foreclosure case is resolved.

Chicago had one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates in the first half of 2022. Some 0.30 percent of the city’s housing units had foreclosure filings, compared with the national rate of 0.12 percent, according to a midyear report from Attom Data Solutions that analyzed more than 200 major metro areas.

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