GW Properties is exiting one of its pandemic-era developments — a shopping center in the western suburb of Oak Brook —for $41 million.
Chicago-based GW, which is one of the most active retail developers in the area, sold the property for $41 million, according to DuPage County records. The sale was reported last month, but the price was not disclosed at the time.
Mitch Goltz, principal at GW, said the development sustained a series of challenges, weathering pandemic delays, rising construction costs, market turmoil and rising interest rates, but that it succeeded because of the strength of the tenants and the submarket.
“I call it the Covid special because there was really no market condition that we weren’t subject to here. There are plenty of other projects that we have worked on where any one or two of these items that we had to work through could have crippled the project to where it didn’t get off the ground,” he said.
The developer sold the property to MetLife Investment Management, which did not respond to a request for comment. Alex Sharrin and Michael Nieder with JLL Retail Capital Markets represented GW.
Located at 1715-1775 W. 22nd Street in Oak Brook, the shopping center is 100-percent leased, with tenants including Guidepost Montessori School, Lazy Dog Restaurant, Panera and Vet Emergency Group.
Goltz said much of the narrative around retail is dictated by the performance of certain markets, but retail is very segmented, with geographic areas and certain store types performing better than others. All tenants in The Overlook at Oak Brook were either services that people in the area needed, or tenants relocating to a better location.
“Oak Brook is one of the strongest retail corridors in the country, let alone the Chicagoland market, so we’ve benefited by just being top quality real estate in a top quality market,” he said. “That has obviously led to strength that would otherwise be very, very difficult to see if it was a different submarket.”
It’s not the only property the developer has sold in the last two years. In March, the company sold Waukegan Plaza, a 211,000-square-foot shopping center, to a West Coast investor A Gardena for $16.8 million.
Last November, the company cashed in on a medical office property the firm built at Chicago’s busy Six Corners intersection, selling the two-story building to Oak Brook’s Inland Real Estate Group for more than $16 million.
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