JLL’s co-head of Chicago, Midwest retail sales jumps to RPT

JLL’s Chicago office has lost one of its top retail property sales brokers to New York-based investment firm RPT Realty.

Amy Sands, who held the title of co-head of JLL’s retail investment advisory for Chicago and the Midwest, is leaving the brokerage to become head of investments for RPT, a publicly traded real estate investment trust, starting May 8, RPT announced Wednesday. 

“With $1.7 billion of remaining committed capital from the company’s two joint ventures, there are material opportunities to continue to reshape and improve the quality and value of the portfolio in the coming years,” Sands said in a statement.

Sands played a major role in building JLL’s Midwest retail platform from the ground up. She has completed more than $10 billion worth of retail transactions over the past decade and has more than 20 years of real estate experience, having previously worked for HFF, Equity Office Properties and GGP.

Sands’ recent notable deals include last year’s $94 million sale of the Neiman Marcus building on the Magnificent Mile by UBS Realty Investors, which Sands represented, to Silvestri Investments after six months on the market. And while still with JLL in late 2021, she also represented RPT in its sale of a 166,000-square-foot grocery-anchored suburban retail center in Glen Ellyn for $30 million to local investor North America Real Estate Group.

With Sands’ hire, RPT is consolidating its investment activities under one team that will source acquisitions for the firm’s wholly-owned portfolio as well as for its grocery-anchored platform and retail net lease venture platform. 

 “Amy will bring a dynamic investment prowess and a large institutional network that will be complementary to all three platforms and our investor bases,” Brian Harper, CEO of RPT, said in a statement.

RPT’s focus is open-air shopping centers, wholly owning 44 across major U.S. markets and partially owning 13 through its grocery-anchored joint venture and 48 through its net lease joint venture, totaling 15 million square feet of leasable space that was almost 94 percent leased at the end of 2022, according to the company.