Eat or be eaten is the law of the real estate jungle, and these days, Harvey Camins is enjoying his nosh.
Camins is Midwest region president of Insignia/FC&S, which said Tuesday it is combining with another top local real estate firm, Goldie B. Wolfe & Co.
Seventeen staffers from the Wolfe company, which does primarily tenant representation, will be joining Insignia, including the inimitable Goldie Wolfe herself, who will become executive managing director overseeing all brokerage services throughout metropolitan Chicago.
The Wolfe move follows announcement of other new hires by Insignia, including former top staff of three highly regarded local real estate firms–Miglin-Beitler, Tanguay-Burke-Stratton and John Buck Co.
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Camins said these maneuvers are part of the trend in which real estate service firms are consolidating, with the big national companies grabbing people from the local and regional shops–and sometimes the shop itself.
Last spring Camins’ old firm, Frain Camins & Swartchild Inc., a leading local company, got swallowed whole by Insignia Financial Group of Greenville, S.C., a commercial real estate giant.
The renamed Insignia/FC&S operation, with access to capital to rev up its operations and staff, has swelled its management portfolio 40 percent. It recently got a contract for the gaudy behemoth at 311 S. Wacker Drive, a 1.3 million-square-foot confection emblematic of the late 1980s development exuberance.
“We felt small and vulnerable,” Camins said. “We wanted to be part of the future, not on the outside looking in, losing people all the time.”
The only catch is that the newly enlarged firm will be renamed again in a form that erases the echo of the old Frain Camins & Swartchild.
With Insignia’s acquisition of Wolfe, the real estate services company will be known as Insignia/ESG–the initials standing for Edward S. Gordon, a New York-based firm itself acquired by Insignia in 1996.
Green piece: Allison Davis, a Chicago attorney who left his law firm to go into full-time development more than a year ago, is again digging ground in one of his favorite sandpiles–the Near North Side near Cabrini-Green.
Davis, who formed All Chicago LLC last summer for his new venture, is teaming with old buddy Bill Moorehead of Near North Development Corp. on a 101-unit apartment building for the elderly two blocks north of Division Street, on Cleveland Avenue.
The $12.5 million project, construction on which is set to start the first week in February, is intended to be economically mixed, with both market-rate and subsidized apartments, Davis said.
It will be called Evergreen Towers II and be a fancier version of Evergreen Towers I nearby, which Davis and Moorehead also had a hand in developing in the early 1980s.
Davis also teamed with Moorehead on a subsidized family apartment project at Evergreen Avenue and Sedgwick Street, and more recently has been involved with mega-developer Dan McLean putting market-rate homes and subsidized apartments on former city land in the neighborhood.
Davis hopes the new project will be racially as well as economically mixed, a theme he dwells on that many developers would prefer to finesse. It’s a hope that has tested many hearts, particularly in Chicago.
His advocacy of racial and economic integration may have led to rumors he might be interested in redeveloping the Near South Side site of Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, which has been put on the block.
Any developer there would face a delicate task of political maneuvering. Many blacks have jobs at Michael Reese, and the surrounding area is now mostly black but has a recent history as a laboratory for racial integration.
Davis, a native South Sider, said he’d never thought much about the dozens of acres of Michael Reese land, but acknowledged the idea sounds promising.
“Real estate empires are built on speculation, rumor and gossip,” he added.