Developer Wildwood Sells The Porter in Lincoln Park

Matt Katsaros is on a spree of deals.

Shortly after notching a win in Lakeview, his development firm Wilwood Investments sold a 36-unit apartment building in Lincoln Park for $28 million.

The sale price of the building, which is located at 2411 North Lincoln Avenue, was boosted by two ground-level retail spaces that are currently leased by Wells Fargo and Panera Bread, Katsaros said.

The buyer was Chicago-based Highgate Capital Group, which focuses on multifamily investments in secondary markets and didn’t return a request for comment. While it’s unclear exactly how much money the development team put into the project, Katsaros said it sold with a 6 percent capitalization rate.

Wilwood, along with general contractor Contemporary Concepts, opted to build a smaller number of 3- and 4-bedroom units on the oddly shaped triangular lot rather than a higher number of studios and one-bedroom units because of its proximity to DePaul University. The building is more likely to be occupied by tenants living with roommates than properties in other areas of Chicago, Katsaros said.

“Knowing that the DePaul campus is across the street, it’s a pretty youthful base,” he said. “It has 36 units but 98 bedrooms, all rented by the unit.”

The developers also got lucky with a well-timed ordinance change in Chicago that allowed them to reduce the amount of parking spaces they originally intended to include and instead pivot to adding an additional retail space that was eventually filled by Panera. In 2022, the city passed a Transit-Served Location Ordinance that lowered parking requirements for developments within a certain distance from a public transit stop. The ordinance was expanded earlier this year.

“We had programmed a one-to-one [unit-to-parking spot ratio] but we ended up going down to about 50 percent,” he said.

Wildwood bought the development site from Sterling Bay in 2021. Before that, it was a privately-owned greenspace called Julia Porter Park.

Although the team eventually put together a proposal that maximized profitability of the site, it wasn’t an easy parcel to work with. The apartment building comes to a sharp point at the six-cornered intersection of Lincoln, Fullerton avenues and North Halsted Street on the triangular shaped lot.

“Even though we’re limited to 36 units, we made the best of it and we designed as many multiple bedroom units as we could fit in that triangle,” he said.

The deal comes on the heels of solid win from Wilwood and Contemporary Concepts in Lakeview.

The team sold a 95-unit, two-building complex known as the Low-Line Commons for $40 million to Utah-based Highland Partners The deal came out to about $421,000 per unit. Similar to the Lincoln Park sale, the deal came out to a 6 percent capitalization rate, according to Katsaros.

He has also been a buyer of late. Wildwood last month revealed it’s pursuing an office-to-residential conversion of the seven-story loft building at 230 East Ohio Street that it bought for $9.75 million from Horizon Realty Group.