Wurzberger Claims Lender Roc Tricked Him into Guarantee

Shaya Wurzberger, head of prominent Chicago multifamily landlord Levav Properties, is using an aggressive, albeit unconventional, tactic to fight his lender Roc360’s foreclosure lawsuit.

New York-based Wurzberger alleges that his lender, New York-based Roc360, which was formerly known as Roc Capital, essentially pulled a bait-and-switch, according to legal documents filed in Cook County Circuit Court in recent weeks.

In filings that Wurzberger submitted last month in response to Roc’s attempted foreclosure, he claims he was tricked into signing a personal guarantee on an $11.8 million loan covering a portfolio of 14 South Side Chicago apartment buildings. The guarantee, Roc claims, puts Wurzberger on the hook to pay out of pocket to cure any default by the Levav affiliate that borrowed the money, and the lender is seeking full repayment.

According to the filing, Wurzberger wasn’t even present at the February 2024 loan closing, which funded Levav’s $14 million purchase of the 128-unit portfolio. Instead, Wurzberger’s attorney Kathleen Robson argues that Wurzberger signed a blank signature page well ahead of the closing, and then sent it to the lender’s title agent, who then allegedly attached it to a commercial guarantee Wurzberger claims he never reviewed or approved. Wurzberger wasn’t present for the loan closing, and his previously provided signature was used to close the deal while he was remote, according to legal documents.

Roc “has committed fraud as it relates to this guarantee,” Wurzberger’s court filing said, explaining that neither the investor nor his real estate attorney ever saw the agreement until after the foreclosure lawsuit was filed. Wurzberger said he would never have agreed to the loan had he known it would require him to guarantee the performance of the Levav affiliate he formed to borrow the money for the deal.

Wurzberger, who is in his early 30s, has said he owns 1,000 Chicago apartments that he has spent about $100 million to purchase since 2022. Yet, most sophisticated borrowers go to great lengths to avoid admitting they signed documents in blank or failed to review the final multimillion-dollar loan — especially when guaranteeing their own personal funds as collateral.

(An analysis by The Real Deal verified Wurzberger owns upward of 500 units, which he spent $50 million to purchase between 2022 and mid-2025, according to public records, though the analysis was not comprehensive of all of Wurzberger’s properties.)

Wurzberger previously told TRD that he “paid a little too much” for the portion of Levav’s portfolio that Roc is claiming fell into a loan default. The biggest Chicago properties subject to Roc’s foreclosure against Wurzberger’s Levav affiliate are: the 17-unit building at 1527 West 78th Street, a 16-unit building at 7905 South Champlain Avenue and the 13-unit property at 11107 South Emerald Avenue.

The other Levav properties in the foreclosure lawsuit are at:

6548 South Perry Avenue
9050 South Ashland Avenue
8752 South Cottage Grove Avenue
8001 South Wood Street
907 West Garfield Boulevard
6049 South Princeton Avenue
8754 South Ashland Avenue
6617 South Perry Avenue
7348 South Artesian Avenue

Court filings show Levav offered to surrender its ownership of the properties to Roc, but the lender so far hasn’t responded. Rather, Roc is pursuing the guarantee it claims Wurzberger is on the hook to pay.

Wurzberger didn’t return a request for comment, and Robson, his attorney, declined to comment. Roc and its attorney in the foreclosure dispute, Ira T. Nevel, also didn’t return requests for comment.

More South Side real estate pressure

The legal battle is heating up at a precarious time for Wurzberger. He is already in the midst of offloading a separate 22-building portfolio in Chicago, totaling 311 units recently listed for sale with Colliers — a move that signals the mounting pressure on South Side landlords.

Much of the area’s multifamily sector is reeling from a mix of high expenses stemming largely from property tax hikes as well as stagnant rents, plus difficulty collecting from and vacating non-paying tenants. The Levav entity facing Roc’s foreclosure, Q Portfolio LLC, is in the midst of suing handfuls of tenants for evictions, court records show.

Furthermore, many other out-of-state investors who bought multifamily properties on Chicago’s South Side in recent years have started to face financial distress, as interest rates remain elevated compared to pre-pandemic lows and property values fail to rise to the level buyers had hoped when they placed their real estate bets.

Roc was also a go-to lender for Yissocher “Izzy” Rotenberg, a Brooklyn-based investor who spent $48 million to buy about 500 apartments in Chicago in 2022 and 2023, but had his real estate empire crumble last year amid more than a dozen foreclosure lawsuits and additional lender takeaways.

Some investors had bet catalytic projects such as the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park would spike property values. But that has failed to materialize to the degree needed to avoid sinking real estate into loan defaults.

A new court date has yet to be scheduled to determine the merit of Wurzberger’s claims that Roc tricked him into promising he would pay to backfill any default on the mortgage debt.