Despite Lincoln Park retail boom, LLJ working through $10M loan default

Strolling down Lincoln Park’s Armitage Avenue lately, you’d beryllium hard-pressed to find galore bare storefronts. Retailers are flocking to Chicago’s spendy North Side, cementing the high-street corridor arsenic a premier playground for boutiques and digitally autochthonal brands establishing a brick-and-mortar presence.

Even successful a booming existent property scene, however, there’s a small distress for those who cognize wherever to look.

This week’s head-scratcher comes from The Armitage Collection astatine 1123-1131 West Armitage Avenue. Word successful fiscal trenches is that the borrower, San Diego-based spot concern steadfast LLJ Ventures, tripped up connected a Jan. 6 maturity date, defaulting connected astir $10 cardinal it inactive owes connected a indebtedness against the 33,000-square-foot property. Public indebtedness information from past period reveals the commercialized mortgage-backed information debt’s peculiar servicer, PNC Bank-owned Midland Loan Services, is prepping a foreclosure complaint, arsenic good arsenic a petition for receivership to commencement the process of taking rubric to the property. The indebtedness was taken retired by LLJ successful precocious 2015.

But Midland is besides leaving the doorway unfastened to keeping the keys successful LLJ’s hands. The peculiar servicer is considering a indebtedness modification that could springiness the landlord much clip to repay the debt, portion keeping the menace of foreclosure an enactment during negotiations implicit presumption of the workout.

Reached by telephone Friday, LLJ’s Flavio Borquez said the steadfast is adjacent to an statement with Midland that would springiness the landlord immoderate much runway with the property, and expects to debar a ceremonial foreclosure process. He declined to stock details of the imaginable presumption of the agreement.

Here’s wherever the beverage leaves get cryptic for opportunistic buyers: Chicago-based brokerage Mid-America Real Estate since September has been buying the spot for merchantability connected behalf of LLJ, asking $10.5 million, according to a selling flyer. The spot looks unchangeable connected paper, arsenic it’s pulling successful astir $738,000 successful yearly nett operating income and boasts a 9.4-year weighted mean lease term.

It’s anchored by The Goddard School, which conscionable inked a 10-year renewal to instrumentality its enactment done September 2036, and rounded retired by trendy manner tenants similar high-end fittingness nine Studio Lagree, Armitage Allergy & Asthma Associates and luxury favored wellness workplace Bowie Barker. Mid-America’s selling materials stress the site’s aboriginal upside stemming from its proximity to the $3 cardinal Foundry Park riverfront megaproject that’s being revived by Jim Letchinger’s JDL and Kayne Anderson from the ashes of embattled Sterling Bay’s failed Lincoln Yards.