Continental Realty Enters Chicago Market With $94M Retail Portfolio Buy

Image courtesy of CRC

Continental Realty Corp. has bought a five-property shopping center portfolio in the Chicago area for $93.6 million. DiMucci Cos. was the seller, while Tucker Development was the acquisition and development consultant.

The properties are all grocery-anchored and necessity-based, and total more than 900,000 square feet of gross leasable space.

Each property is located 10 to 35 miles from downtown Chicago. At the time of the sale, the portfolio was cumulatively 84 percent leased, with roughly 39 percent of the total leasable space occupied by grocery or drug stores. JM Schapiro, CEO of CRC, said in prepared remarks that the company intends to fill existing vacancies with restaurant, entertainment, soft goods as well as medical categories.

The properties in the portfolio sale are the 392,000-square-foot Cicero Marketplace in Cicero, Ill.; the 101,000-square-foot Northwest Shopping Center in Palatine, Ill.; the 145,000-square-foot Golf Plaza II Shopping Center in Mount Prospect, Ill.; the 241,000-square-foot Fox River Commons in Naperville, Ill., and the 24,000-square-foot English Valley Shopping Center in Palatine, Ill.

Sam’s Club, The Home Depot, Jewel-Osco, Kroger, Walgreens and Ross Dress for Less are among the tenants at the properties. On a 5-mile radius of each shopping center, there’s an average of 384,000 residents with a household income of roughly $106,000.

An investment fund focused on value-add retail

CRC purchased all five assets on behalf of its Continental Realty Opportunistic Retail Investment Fund I, a private equity fund it formed in 2021 that focuses on purchasing value-add and income-producing retail assets in targeted submarkets throughout the country. This acquisition is the fifth for the Fund, following the $97 million purchase of The Shoppes at Webb Gin in Atlanta and the $24.4 million acquisition of Banks Crossing in Fayetteville, Ga. Oakland Plaza and Oakland Square in Troy, Mich., two assets that total nearly 392,000 square feet of retail space and that traded for $34 million, were the first acquisitions of the Fund last fall.

Moody’s Analytics data shows that the Chicago metropolitan area is the top U.S. market for economic diversity, while Chicago’s retail market is the third-largest economy in the nation, with approximately $120 billion in annual retail sales.