From luxury North Shore homes trading at steep discounts to zoning battles in Fulton Market and a lawsuit in the Loop, Chicago’s real estate scene moved through a few scrapes and bold bets this week.
A lakefront Kenilworth estate once listed for $14 million sold for just $6.8 million Thursday. With the new owners planning to demolish the 11,000-square-foot mansion on 1.6 acres along Sheridan Road, the deal highlights that even in exclusive areas, buyers are looking for move-in ready properties.
Elsewhere on the North Shore, Highland Park boxed out the self-storage investor who rebounded Michael Jordan’s former mansion at a huge discount. The new owner, John Cooper, had intended to convert the estate into a timeshare-like property, offering a one-week annual stay of “Champions Point” for $1 million. However, local authorities banned timeshares in the town this week, leaving Cooper with a high-value property that now looks more like a conventional resale than a reinvented business model.
Turbulence continues to jolt Chicago’s affordable housing system. The Chicago Housing Authority lost another senior executive this week, with HR chief Dominick Maniscalco walking away for a job with Milwaukee Public Schools. He’s the ninth top CHA official to depart in a year, and the agency remains without a permanent CEO amid a delay to the appointment of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s choice to fill the role, former alderman Walter Burnett Jr.
In Fulton Market, deals and disputes are heating up. Waterton paid $89.5 million for The Mason, a 263-unit rental tower at 180 North Ada Street, removing one option for investors out of a long list of Chicago multifamily assets currently listed for sale.
Just a few blocks away, Domus Real Estate Group has to push harder. Its plan for a 30-story, 347-unit tower at 215 North Racine is colliding with city zoning limits. Domus wants to pump the floor-area ratio to 24 times the size of the lot — a bold ask by Fulton Market standards. Officials suggested additional land acquisition to soften the bonus density, but neighbors worry that the next chapter for the corridor could look less like loft conversions and more like Loop towers.
There’s always action in the Loop, where a fight is brewing that involves city subsidies going into the LaSalle Street Reimagined office-to-residential conversion program. Celadon Partners is sparring with its ex-partner Primera Group, alleging it got cut out of a deal to turn much of the Clark Adams Building into apartments, underscoring how developer alliances can quickly turn contentious.
In the southwest suburbs, JSB Capital Group wrapped up a $65 million multifamily purchase that helped end a messy legal fight between Kansas City-based lender 7 Acre Investments and the developer of the property in New Lenox. JSB bought Lincoln Station, a 220-unit complex, after its builder Richard Gammonley, allegedly defaulted on a rescue capital loan from 7 Acre.
And in Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood, the city approved a $30 million Hampton by Hilton project, bringing 101 hotel rooms to the Far South Side with the first lodging development in the area in decades. The hotel is being touted as more than just a project: it’s a marker of outside capital finally staking a claim in an area long overlooked by mainstream development.