Cook County Foreclosures Jumped to Start Summer, Slowed in July

Cook County foreclosure filings rose along with the summer heat as Chicago — and Illinois as a whole — became the nation’s hottest foreclosure spots.

Lenders started 675 foreclosure court proceedings in May, and in June that number rose to 747 before falling to 504 in July, public records show. The total value of the 1,926 mortgages that lenders began foreclosing upon over the past three months is more than $637 million, according to The Real Deal’s analysis of foreclosure data.

By comparison, lenders started 482 foreclosure proceedings in April and 912 in March, with those underlying mortgages totaling more than $280 million.

Similar to March and April, U.S. Bank filed the most notices of foreclosure, with 111 foreclosure starts in May, 93 in June and 82 in July. Those monthly figures still mark a decline from March, when U.S. Bank filed 165 notices.

Adventus Realty Trust, a Canadian firm with significant Chicago-area office holdings, is the borrower facing the biggest loan to enter foreclosure proceedings in the last three months. Its $114 million debt tied to the Riverway office complex near O’Hare International Airport at 9377 West Higgins Road drew a lawsuit from a party representing the lender. The debt was originally issued in 2016 by JP Morgan Chase and was sold off to investors in commercial mortgage-backed securities.

Here’s where foreclosure court cases began in the last three months:

Leaflet map created by Adam Farence | Data by © OpenStreetMap, under ODbl.

May’s biggest casualty was another office property at 931 West 19th Street in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, where a representative of another lender began foreclosing on a venture of developer Condor Partners over a $33.3 million mortgage issued in 2018. In a rare move, Freddie Mac notched June’s biggest foreclosure start over an $11.1 million mortgage taken out in 2019 against the South Side apartments at 4624 South Ellis Avenue. That lawsuit has to do with the landlord, Apex Chicago IL, facing accusations that it hasn’t kept the property in compliance with codes that ensure resident safety and habitability.

Cook County’s median foreclosure amount for May, June and July were respectively $172,000, $166,500 and $161,948. April’s median mortgage amount foreclosed upon was $174,510, compared to March’s $166,920, an analysis of records show.

Nationwide, new foreclosure filings fell 9 percent last month from June, but were up 5 percent from a year ago, according to Irvine, California-based real estate data firm ATTOM.

Both Chicago and Illinois stand out in ATTOM’s data. The city ranked first among large metropolitan areas for the most properties repossessed by lenders through completed foreclosures in July, with 233. New York City saw the second-most at 148, followed by St. Louis at 104.

The report also found that lenders repossessed more properties through foreclosure in Illinois than any other state last month, with 355, followed by Pennsylvania at 230 and California at 217.