Lender Churchill Ramps Up Foreclosures Against Nussbaum

Justin Ehrlich and Sorabh Maheshwari’s lending firm is peppering indicted New York real estate attorney Mark Nussbaum and his Chicago deal partner Eliazer Tauber with more foreclosure lawsuits.

An affiliate of the Ehrlich-founded finance shop Churchill Real Estate, with offices in New York, Charlotte and Tokyo, is also turning its attention to other borrowers who bought properties on Chicago’s South Side and have since fallen into financial trouble, too, public records show.

Properties owned by Airmont, New York-based Tauber and New York City-based Nussbaum, the latter of whom has been accused of running a Ponzi scheme with customer escrow accounts, are the subjects of at least 32 foreclosure lawsuits filed against companies they control or manage, public records show.

The newest lawsuits, filed in Cook County court between October and March, bring the duo’s total combined amount of mortgage debt now in foreclosure to more than $25 million. Their lenders, and in particular the Churchill affiliate Tryon Street Acquisition Trust, are also ramping up foreclosures against other out-of-state landlords, such as Lakewood, New Jersey-based Shlomo Lisauer and Monsey, New York-based Akiva Tauber, who invested in the same South Side neighborhoods as Nussbaum and Tauber in recent years. (It’s unclear whether Akiva Tauber is related to Eliazer Tauber.)

The wave of distress cresting in South Side neighborhoods — including South Shore, Chatham and Auburn Gresham — is sending real estate investments into the gutter. The loans now breaking apart are subjecting property owners to financial risk and their tenants to less than ideal conditions, as investors become unwilling or unable to fund necessary building repairs and renovations. Generally, the deals were made in the last three years while interest rates were elevated from pandemic-era lows.

So far, Nussbaum and Eliazer Tauber haven’t responded to the foreclosure suits in court filings, and judgments of foreclosure have begun to be entered against their companies.

Troubled property owned by Nussbaum, Tauber and Lisauer stretches as far to the north as North Lawndale and as far south as Roseland. In total, the three investors, along with Akiva Tauber and Brooklyn-based Yosef Grunwald had control of 418 apartments in South Side buildings now facing foreclosure lawsuits, property records show.

Akiva Tauber also owns a few other properties in the area that aren’t subject to foreclosure lawsuits at this time, as does Grunwald, whose foreclosure dispute is with Fannie Mae. But each of them, even at properties where lenders aren’t breathing down their neck, have also faced building code violation complaints from the city of Chicago in recent months, including some cases that remain unresolved.

The lawsuits shed light on massive valuation gaps between the amounts investors were able to borrow over the past few years and the true values of their properties on the South Side. Such large differences have become a hallmark of troubled Chicago purchases executed by investors in South Side multifamily properties in the post-pandemic market.

Publicly assessed values of the properties are far lower than their debts. The Cook County Board of Review — the arbiter of real estate values for property tax purposes — assigned properties owned by Nussbaum, the Taubers, Lisauer and Grunwald combined values of $28.2 million for the most recent assessment cycle. That represents only a fraction of the total $36 million in debt the five investors now have in foreclosure proceedings.

Nussbaum appeared not to know what properties he still owned with Tauber in a court filing that’s part of his alternative to bankruptcy proceedings in New York state.

Nussbaum penned a disclaimer regarding the properties linked to his frequent partner Eliazer Tauber and his son, Jacob Tauber, who also goes by Yanky Tauber. While the “real estate associated with Yanky Tauber is an original complete list,” Nussbaum wrote in the affidavit, “I understand that some were sold or otherwise transferred.”

Nussbaum also claimed in his legal filing that he has “no actual knowledge of the values” and takes “no responsibility for any discrepancies to the actual value of such real estate.”

While Lisauer only began to face foreclosure lawsuits this year, he hired the Eliazer Tauber-led Straightline Management property management firm to operate buildings within his Chicago portfolio, public records show.

Lisauer began buying Chicago property in 2022 with a deal that involved Nussbaum’s former law firm, Nussbaum Lowinger, but bulked up his acquisitions in the winter of 2025. That’s when Lisauer began purchasing South Side real estate using mortgage loans from Uniondale, New York-based CliffCo to fund his acquisitions — the same lender that became Tauber’s go-to shop in 2024.

Churchill affiliate Tryon Street is foreclosing on 20 of the 37 allegedly non-performing properties owned by Nussbaum, Lisauer and Eliazer Tauber, court filings show. Tryon looks to have taken over loan notes for the properties originated by lenders including CliffCo and Sharestates, though it’s unclear whether Tryon paid less than the face value of the loans.

Akiva Tauber’s property at 7800 South Throop Street is also in the crosshairs of a Tryon foreclosure lawsuit filed in January, court records show. Akiva Tauber bought the 10-unit building for just under $1.3 million in December 2024, using a $881,000 mortgage from Churchill; the property was assessed at just $533,000 by Cook County tax officials for 2024.

An attorney for Nussbaum didn’t return requests for comment. Emails sent to Yanky Tauber, Straightline and lawyers for each lender foreclosing on the borrowers elicited no responses. A person who answered a phone number associated with Lisauer last week said he was unavailable to comment. Churchill didn’t return requests for comment. Grunwald said in an email earlier this year that his troubled loan was in the process of being “reinstated” but didn’t elaborate when asked for additional details on his plan to resolve the debt dispute.

Nussbaum was arraigned in May 2025 on criminal accusations that he diverted over $15 million between September 2024 and March 2025 that was supposed to be held in two alleged victims’ escrow accounts. Nussbaum has pleaded not guilty, and the case remains pending. He has also since admitted in legal filings to diverting $336 million from his law firm’s escrow clients to late real estate investor Mendel Steiner and Steiner’s family between 2022 and 2025 as part of an alleged Ponzi scheme.

As of December, Churchill said it had originated $11.9 billion worth of real estate debts since 2019 that are considered debt service coverage ratio loans and “residential transition” loans, according to its website. It calls itself a specialist in real estate debt, equity and distressed properties. In a 2022 press release, as interest rates were on the rise, the firm was touting its “Liquidity Relief Financing” programs designed to give loan originators “quick and efficient access to financing options to reduce the need to liquidate loans into the market at deep discounts.”

Outside Churchill’s grasp, at least one property Lisauer owned, the 24-unit building at 7822 South South Shore Drive in Chicago, is already back in the hands of a different lender. The property is being marketed for sale by Roni Yaghoobzar of New York-based brokerage Safdie Realty Group, on behalf of an investor who bought a loan note issued to Lisauer in 2022.

It’s unclear how much the investor, who Yaghoobzar declined to name, paid for the loan note, but the broker said it was well below the $2.3 million face value of the loan when it was originated by a company called Arion Fund, to finance Lisauer’s $2.9 million purchase of the property. Yaghoobzar said the building was seized by the note buyer through a UCC foreclosure in recent months, after an auction for the property drew no other bids.

He said the New York-based loan note buyer is still active in Chicago and eyeing more acquisitions of multifamily debt that falls into financial trouble.

“My understanding is the upside that these [South Side] investors promised their lender never ended up materializing because of how hard it is to even collect rent, and all the expenses on the properties,” Yaghoobzar said. “And they just weren’t able to cover their loans.”