Bob Whelan Pays DRA Advisors $32M for Crystal Lake Retail

Bob Whelan has become the latest investor to pluck a part of a Chicagoland retail portfolio out of a piecemeal sale by a New York investor.

The Louisiana-based investor, whose PMAT Companies has been an active buyer and seller throughout the Midwest, most recently snapped up a shopping center in the northwest suburb of Crystal Lake for $32 million.

The deal marks the latest of dozens of sales of retail properties in the region by New York-based DRA Advisors, public records show.

Using a $20 million mortgage from fellow Louisiana firm B1 Bank, PMAT bought the 317,000-square-foot Crystal Point shopping center at 6000 Northwest Highway, which is 87 percent leased to tenants including Best Buy, a Steinhafel’s furniture store, Ross, TJ Maxx, Panera Bread and others, according to public records and the brokerage Mid-America Real Estate Corporation.

“Amidst the inefficiency of the capital markets today, we are aggressively pursuing additional acquisitions of fundamentally sound select open air retail assets anchored primarily by strong grocery, off-price, discount, necessity, and fitness tenants in suburban markets nationally — including Chicagoland where we own approximately 1 million square feet,” PMAT President Kevin Kush told The Real Deal.

DRA did not return a request for comment.

Ben Wineman, Rick Drogosz, and Joe Girardi of Mid-America brokered the Crystal Point sale on behalf of DRA.

DRA originally acquired its 3.7 million-square-foot Midwest retail portfolio as part of a $2.3 billion merger with Oak Brook-based Inland Real Estate, which included a Chicago-area roster of properties worth about $540 million. DRA earlier this year signaled its intent to liquidate the portfolio — which had consisted of 24 properties, 17 of them in Chicagoland at the time of its listing.

DRA has moved several of its key assets in recent weeks, including a previously unreported $8.4 million sale of the Two Rivers shopping center in south suburban Bolingbrook to the Encino, California-based real estate firm Ethan Christopher, according to Will County records.

The Crystal Lake and Bolingbrook deals follow another DRA sale that closed earlier this month, when New York-based Nassimi Realty paid nearly $24 million for the Four Flaggs shopping center, a 326,000-square-foot asset in north suburban Niles, The Real Deal previously reported.

And next door in Crystal Lake, just to the east of Crystal Point on the Northwest Highway, DRA in May sold the 97,000-square-foot Bohl Farm Marketplace shopping center for about $16 million to San Diego-based The Niki Group.

For Whelan, who is also a trustee of retail industry group ICSC, the more recent Crystal Lake deal adds to his firm’s holdings in the Chicago area. PMAT late last year also bought the 274,000-square-foot Wind Point Shopping Center in west suburban Batavia from Kimco for $21 million. And earlier in 2022, PMAT picked up the 133,000-square-foot open air shopping center known as Prairie Market in southwest suburban Oswego.