Sovereignty Management Pays $28M for Richton Park Apartments

A large housing complex in Chicago’s south suburbs has traded hands as apartment rents in the metro area surpass the national average.

The 342-unit, 240,000-square-foot Richton Square apartment complex at 22300 Richton Square Road in Richton Park sold for $27.5 million in a sale closed Aug. 11, according to Cook County public records.

An LLC that shares an address with Chicago-based developer and property manager Sovereignty Management bought the property from a venture led by Niranjan Shah, chairman of Globetrotters, a Chicago-based engineering and management firm. The firm did not respond to a request for comment. Shah’s LLC had bought the property from a land trust in 2005 for $4.2 million.

The price per unit of about $80,000 puts the sale on par with one of Chicago’s largest-ever multifamily deals, the Pangea Properties portfolio sale, which sources said came out to a per-unit price of more than $75,000. It’s below last year’s median per-unit sales price for multifamily sales, which was $168,300, according to a fourth-quarter report from Northmarq.

Sovereignty Management has managed, consulted on, stabilized and rehabilitated more than 140 properties involving over 3,500 residential units, according to the company’s website. The firm says its rehabilitation projects often involved properties that had been given back to the lenders or were mismanaged or neglected.

Its current and former Chicago-area projects include several smaller multifamily buildings on the city’s North Side and a portfolio of about 100 single-family homes on the South and West sides.

Globetrotters’ property management arm has developed, rehabilitated and managed market-rate and affordable residential properties since 1983, according to its website.

Chicago’s apartment rents are rising at an annual rate of 3.6 percent, three times higher than the national average, according to a report this week from CoStar. The metro area’s apartment rent growth has been the highest among its major market peers for the last three quarters, per the report. Still, that rate is below the 7.9 percent growth the metro area posted in the first quarter of 2022.