Fidelis pays Seritage $13M for former Sears store

Alan Hassenflu’s Fidelis Realty Partners made its entry into the Chicago-area market with the $13 million purchase of a former Sears store from Seritage Growth Properties.

An LLC sharing an address with the Houston, Texas-based commercial real estate firm Fidelis bought the 130,000-square-foot building at 2860 South Highland Avenue in the western suburb of Lombard for $12.6 million earlier this month, according to DuPage County property records. The single-tenant property sits on an eight-acre lot and was built in 2001, according to an online listing.

It’s a much higher price than Seritage, which was formed in 2015 to sell off Sears’ real estate portfolio, has had to offer buyers to find deals in recent months.

It has sold several vacant former Sears stores, including a $4 million sale to an auto dealer of an empty 190,000-square-foot department store and 24,000-square-foot auto center building in Joliet. And in Orland Park, the vacant 200,000-square-foot former Sears store at the Orland Square Mall was sold by Seritage last month for $4.3 million to an LLC tied to James Lin, the CEO of California-based logistics firm UNIS Fulfillment and Transportation, according to public records.

However, the Lombard building is occupied by The Dump, a discount furniture chain, providing the new property owner rental revenue, though the terms of its lease are unclear. Seritage and Fidelis didn’t return requests for comment.

The building appears to be Fidelis’ first purchase in Illinois, according to the company’s website. The firm’s portfolio includes more than 60 properties in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Dakota and Colorado.

Suburban retail rents in the Chicago area have risen since 2019 due to limited development and tight supply, according to a September report from Cushman & Wakefield. As construction completions went down each year during that time frame, the average asking rent on triple-net retail leases rose to $17.75 in the first half of 2022 from about $16 in 2019. Chicago-area retail investment sales picked up in 2021 and the first half of 2022 after lagging during the pandemic, according to the report.

Seritage still owns two Chicago-area shopping centers, one in the city at 5050 South Kedzie Avenue and one in the far south suburb of Steger at 3231 Chicago Road.

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