Eliazer Tauber had a no good, very bad summer.
The New York-based investor was recently hit with a second round of foreclosure filings against several multifamily properties he owns on Chicago’s South Side. The new lawsuits bring the total number of Chicago real estate loan default complaints brought against him to 16 since June.
The filings come at a time when several other landlords across Chicago’s South and West side neighborhoods are facing foreclosures on multifamily properties that have been flipped multiple times in short succession.
The Real Deal reported on the first nine foreclosures against Tauber earlier this summer. All of the properties involved were purchased for far more than appraised values set by property tax officials.
Among the latest batch of filings is a $1 million foreclosure of a 9-unit property at 1003 West 58th Street that sheds new light on Tauber’s involvement with embattled attorney Mark Nussbaum.
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Nussbaum, who shut down his law firm in January, is under indictment in New York for grand larceny for allegedly bilking investors out of at least $15 million in escrow deposits. Nussbaum has pleaded not guilty.
He and Tauber secured a $1 million loan on the West 58th Street property even though it was worth just $400,000 three years ago and hasn’t undergone any major renovations, permitting records show.
Here’s a timeline of how they did it:
March 30, 2022: Lakewood, New Jersey-based CMP Trading, which has been involved with Nussbaum on other transactions, bought the South Side property for $405,000. The 9-unit, 1920s-era brick apartment building is located in the Englewood neighborhood where mid-size multifamily sales rarely break $100,000 per unit and single family homes are listed for less than $200,000.
April 8, 2022: About a week after buying it, CMP sold the building to an LLC controlled by Ascher Berkowitz for $580,000. Berkowitz took out a 30-year, $430,000 mortgage from an entity called Commercial Lender LLC to fund the purchase.
February 27, 2023: Some portion of Berkowitz’s LLC was transferred to a new owner for $375,000, though details are scant.
February 28, 2023: An entity controlled by Nussbaum bought the West 58th Street property for $820,000 and took out a $565,000 mortgage against it from Accolend.
Accolend is a Teaneck, New Jersey-based lender that has worked with Nussbaum on other Chicago deals and has sold some of its debt off to an affiliate of Athene Annuity and Life Company.
April 25, 2024: A Nussbaum-led entity took out a new $1.045 million loan on the property from Sharestates, a Great Neck, New York-based crowdfunding platform that Nussbaum has worked with in the past. Eli Tauber signed the mortgage documents.
May 8, 2024: Nussbaum paid off the $565,000 Accolend loan, according to a publicly recorded mortgage release.
September 10, 2025: Wilmington Trust, acting as a trustee of the $1 million loan originated by Sharestates, filed a foreclosure complaint, also listing Sharestates as a defendant. The filing states that the Nussbaum and Tauber entity has not made monthly payments since February.
The bigger picture
The 16 foreclosures filed against Tauber this summer all apply to properties he bought between February 2023 and May 2024, and total nearly $10 million in unpaid debts.
Besides the West 58th Street building, the other properties facing foreclosure have only traded hands among the network of East Coast investors once. But all of them sold for prices well above their publicly appraised value.
Tauber and Nussbaum’s deals raise questions about the purpose of the transactions and whether properties were sold in order to obtain larger loans without any money changing hands.
Tauber has signed multiple loans on behalf of Nussbaum’s entities. He and his son Jacob Tauber have been Nussbaum’s known deal partners on Chicago multifamily properties through a company called Straightline Management, according to people familiar with the investors.
While Nussbaum has served real estate clients as a lawyer, he also became a fast-acting lender to help multifamily buyers show they had funds to close transactions.
He began buying Chicago apartment buildings that were in rough shape as a white knight, saving the previous owners from facing foreclosures or city building code violation cases.
“For those properties in which he does hold some indirect interest, Mr. Nussbaum assumed control from prior, struggling owners and cured pre-existing violations,” Nussbaum’s attorney, Ethan Kobre of Schwartz Sladkus Reich Greenberg Atlas, previously told TRD.
But investors following similar playbooks have recently faced scrutiny and even federal investigations.
Federal agencies have discovered a pervasive scheme where investors buy a property and quickly sell it to a straw buyer at a higher price. The inflated price allows the owners to obtain a bigger loan, often from Fannie or Freddie, than they otherwise would have received. The goal is to buy real estate with no money down.
Some conspirators, including Eli and Aron Puretz, Moshe Silber, Fred Schulman and Boruch Drillman, have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. More indictments are expected to come. Many of the players at the center of the DOJ’s investigation have ties to Lakewood, New Jersey.
The DOJ has not brought any criminal charges or allegations of wrongdoing against Nussbaum and there is no known investigation into Nussbaum’s transactions in Chicago.