Great Lakes REIT, whose search for strategic alternatives had seemingly hit a lull, has a deal to sell its medical office portfolio, barely a year after entering that specialized real estate field.
The Oak Brook-based real estate investment trust has an agreement to sell the eight Chicago-area properties to a $400 million medical office fund managed by LaSalle Investment Management, the advisory arm of Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., sources said.
The price is roughly $69 million, or nearly 16 percent more than Great Lakes paid when it acquired the 459,000-square-foot portfolio last year from Advocate Health Care, sources said.
Richard May, Great Lakes chairman and chief executive, said the information about the deal was “factually inaccurate,” but declined to elaborate.
A fund spokesman declined to comment, and executives with real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield Inc., which is advising the REIT, could not be reached for comment.
Bowling in River East: The upscale bowling alley that is negotiating a lease at River East Center in Streeterville is Lucky Strike Lanes, a start-up by entrepreneurs Steven Foster and Kevin Troy, co-founders of the Jillian’s entertainment restaurant chain.
Earlier this year, they opened their first two Lucky Strike Lanes in California. Four more are expected to open next year, including one in Chicago, said a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based chain.
But the Chicago location will have a different name because of the Lucky Strike bowling alleys on Lincoln Avenue and in Hyde Park.
At River East, the fledgling chain is expected to take 36,000 square feet of upper-floor space. Executives with Zifkin Realty & Development LLC, which handles retail leasing for the mixed-use development, could not be reached for comment.
Cushman & Wakefield director: Steven Holmberg on Monday joins the corporate services group of New York-based Cushman & Wakefield as a senior director in the Chicago office. The La Grange native, 42, was a tenant representative earlier in his career, but has primarily been on the landlord side, most recently as a senior vice president with Duke Realty Corp.
Lehman gets Prairie House: After a foreclosure auction, mezzanine lender Lehman Brothers has gained ownership of the unsold units in the Prairie House condominium development on the Near South Side from Bejco Development Corp., said developer Norman Radow, who is taking over the project for Lehman.
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The New York investment bank held the auction Tuesday after it said Chicago-based Bejco failed to pay off $49 million in loans and accrued interest due Oct. 31 to Lehman and construction lender National City Bank.
The change in control was not unexpected, despite a last-minute bid by B.J. Spathies, president of Chicago-based Bejco, to refinance the 187-unit project at 1501 S. Prairie Ave.
Spathies received no payment as a part of the deal, but is cooperating with the transition.
Lehman must still pay off the construction loan, said Radow, president of Atlanta-based Radco Cos., which in September took over RiverBend, Spathies’ downtown condo high-rise, after a default on another loan.
But Prairie House should receive a boost in sales now that the uncertainty over control has been removed, he said.
Lincolnshire leases: Equity Office Properties Trust has signed leases with 19 new tenants for a total of 188,000 square feet of space this year at Tri-State International Office Center in north suburban Lincolnshire, said James Philbin, managing director with the Chicago-based real estate investment trust. As a result, the occupancy rate in the 543,200-square-foot complex has held steady at 85 percent, despite the slow suburban market.
In the largest deal, Open Text Corp. leased 38,000 square feet of space, moving from the Bannockburn Lake Office Plaza. Colliers Bennett & Kahnweiler Inc. represented the Waterloo, Ontario-based software firm.