The developer of a Waukegan condo building sold more than three-quarters of the building’s units for $4.1 million.
Jim Onan, who built Onan Place Condos in 2006, sold 58 of the building’s 74 units to an undisclosed buyer. Onan appears to be the seller based on prior reporting in the Lake County News-Sun. A news release about the deal stating that Kiser Group’s senior director Matt Halper and director Danny Mantis represented the seller did not identify Onan.
“The unique thing about this deal is it’s a bulk condo deal rather than the far more common condo deconversion,” Halper said in a statement.
Though condo deconversions have been on the upswing since 2015, steadily transforming much of Illinois’ condo stock into rentals, the owner of the majority of the units did not want to market the sale as a deconversion despite owning more than the 75 percent required under state law, according to Kiser.
All of the units included in the sale are currently rented to tenants, giving the property an in-place cap rate of 6.3 percent, the brokerage said.
Mantis cited the strength of the far north suburban market and said the area has been seeing strong investor interest from outside Waukegan in recent years.
“The buyer of this property comes into a situation with several options,” he said in a statement. “They will have the opportunity to continue to operate the condo chunk as the seller has and organically raise rents and also will have the opportunity to acquire additional units over time.”
The condo building is among the newest housing stock in the area.
Joseph Rominski, an attorney representing Onan, told the Lake County News-Sun in May the condo units had been slow to sell a decade ago so the Onan family began renting them out. Onan reportedly found a buyer for the 58 units last year, but a conditional use permit not allowing the rental of units caused the sale to be delayed.
Some individual condo owners in the building objected to allowing the units to be rented, fearing that the building would become an all-rental community and displace owners if the property was sold.