The credit union that issued a loan to finance Chicago’s priciest office building purchase in years wants to sell the $220 million note.
Texas-based Unify Financial Credit Union is shopping a $220 million leasehold mortgage that was used to help Opal Holdings and Prana Equities buy the 1.1 million-square-foot Leo Burnett building at 35 West Wacker Drive, Commercial Mortgage Alert reported. The building was purchased for $415 million from Connecticut-based UBS Realty Investors.
“The organization’s portfolio is oversubscribed, and we are trying to move some larger assets off our books,” Neil Kochan, a spokesperson for the credit union, told the outlet.
Raymond Jones Financial began soliciting bids for both loans last month and Stifel Financial has also been marketing the loans.
The New York-based companies of investors Shaya Prager and Katherine Cartagena bought the 50-story Burnett building from UBS in February 2022. The Unify mortgage had and a five-year term. Prana kept the underlying ground sold as part of the deal, splitting the land from the interest in the building’s rental revenue to give the leasehold to Prager’s firm. Meanwhile, Prana secured a separate debt package against the ground lease she inked with Opal.
The Wacker Drive property is mostly occupied, but 93 percent of the space is taken up by only two tenants, which has raised some concerns about potential near-term rollover risk.
Such fears seemed justified earlier this month, when Publicis Groupe, a Paris-based owner of marketing and media companies that include brands such as Leo Burnett Worldwide and Digitas, listed 350,000 square feet of the office space it leases across 32 floors in the Burnett building. The firm is unloading more than half of the 685,000 square feet of office space it leases in the building, and added the largest sublease listing in Chicago to the city’s already flooded secondary market.
In addition, law firm tenant Winston & Strawn is closing in on a deal to lease space in a different, nearby property as its lease in the Leo Burnett building expires in 2027.
— Victoria Pruitt
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