Gary Collins cashes in on vintage Oak Park apartments

Owners of suburban multifamily complexes both old and new are cashing in on this year’s rise in rents.

A venture that’s controlled by investor Gary S. Collins and held a 93-unit vintage apartment building in the first-ring suburb of Oak Park has sold it for $10 million, according to public records. It’s the latest deal illustrating how the market’s tilt toward landlords is affecting apartment building values in the Chicago area and prompting sales by long-term owners.

The property is called the Bon Villa apartments and it was built in the 1920s. Its buyer is an LLC with a Salida, Colorado address registered to Jake Snyder.

Neither Snyder nor Collins could be reached for comment.

Collins’ venture bought the property 15 years ago for a little more than $3 million, records show. Other long-term suburban Chicago owners such as the Wirtz family, which owns the Blackhawks hockey team, made their first sales in recent memory this year, getting about $35 million for an Evanston apartment portfolio. In Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, another family, the Geysers, sold an apartment complex built in 1925 they had kept under family ownership for more than 80 years for $23 million.

Another long-term owner made a pricier deal for a bigger property this summer. Tony Malkin’s real estate company Malkin Properties sold the Glen Oaks Commons property for $74 million to a venture of F&F Realty in August.

Buyers have been willing to make aggressive offers, emboldened by a steady rise in rents in the Chicago area since last year. Recent data from Apartment List pegged a 9 percent rise in average rents over the past year, and they’re projected to keep going up as a slowdown on the completion of new units takes hold amid rising interest rates and construction costs, research firm Integra Realty Resources indicated this month. Even with more than 8,000 new units forecast to be delivered by 2024, which Integra said is a “relatively large number,” the pipeline will be “just enough to bring the market back into balance,” the firm said.

Buildings completed decades ago aren’t the only residential assets testing the market.

Back in Oak Park, a venture of Goldman Sachs is also marketing the suburb’s tallest building for sale with a CBRE listing of the 21-story, 270-unit Vantage apartment complex completed by developer Lee Golub in 2016.

Earlier this year, Austin-based Palladius paid more than $71 million for a 234-unit Oak Park apartment complex completed in 1986 that includes units in a tower as well as 90 walkup townhomes, a rare feature.

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