Chicago’s real estate deal sheet stretched from suburban malls to waterfront mansions this week, while courtroom fights and zoning battles kept the city’s property scene tense.
Nuveen made a $100 million bet on suburban retail, acquiring a redeveloped Algonquin shopping center from Red Mountain Group in one of this year’s biggest retail trades in Chicagoland. The California-based seller had sunk $30 million into repositioning the 600,000-square-foot asset it picked up out of an eight-year-long bout with distress for $33 million.
On the South Side, investor Eliazer Tauber, who’s tied to indicted New York attorney Mark Nussbaum, is facing $10 million in foreclosure suits. The complaints deepen questions about Tauber’s financing web, which includes dozens of distressed multifamily properties.
Elsewhere on the South Side, Chikoo Patel’s multifamily firm CKO Real Estate continues to unravel. American Express filed suit against him this week, adding to a pile of lender claims targeting his troubled portfolio of properties throughout Illinois.
Development tensions are flaring on the North Side, where Edgewater and Uptown residents are plastering billboards and threatening lawsuits over a proposed Broadway upzoning. The measure would allow taller buildings and more commercial uses along the corridor, drawing fire from homeowners wary of density creep.
In Evanston, Will Hunter and Evan Meador’s firm Continuum paid $31 million for the Church Street Plaza site, where it plans a 27-story apartment tower. T2 Capital provided a $27 million loan for the deal, moving the long-discussed redevelopment closer to reality.
More luxury homeowners are feeling like now is the time to test the market in Lake Geneva, where a waterfront mansion just hit the market at $8.5 million. The listing comes on the heels of two other lakefront homes that asked just under $10 million and found buyers within days. Sellers have increasingly favored whispered, off-market dealmaking in the vacation-home enclave, making the public listing a relative rarity.
Back in the Loop, Blackstone and its lender CWCapital are threatening to sue over a $184 million residential conversion plan at the Clark Adams Building. The firms, which control the hotel portion of the property, argue the proposal risks their collateral. It sets up a second high-stakes clash over the adaptive reuse plan following a lawsuit recently filed by the previous partners of one of the office portion’s owners, Primera Group, alleging they were cut out of the property.