Upstart Developer Joy Jordan Resurrecting Fulton Market Deal

Joy Jordan’s $170 million Fulton Market office plan has returned from the grave.

Jordan, a former office leasing broker with Telos Group and Sterling Bay who struck out on her own to try her hand at commercial real estate development, is nearing a legal settlement that would save her deal to purchase an industrial building in Fulton Market.

It sits on a parcel at 415-417 North Sangamon Street slated for a 17-story, 277,000-square-foot office project estimated to cost $170 million to build that her upstart firm Fortem Voluntas proposed.

Her deal to purchase the property at 415 North Sangamon Street for $13 million fell apart in 2023, shortly after she received Chicago City Council approval for the project. The seller, Grey Bemis-Kelley, sued Jordan for failing to close the deal, despite reducing the price to $12.2 million and extending the closing date multiple times since striking the purchase agreement back in 2022.

Bemis-Kelley’s lawsuit sought to force Fortem and its title company to release $500,000 in earnest money the buyer put up ahead of the closing date because Fortem defaulted on the agreement.

But Jordan fought back against Bemis-Kelley’s allegations, countering with a claim that the seller failed to disclose that one of the buildings on the site was a “character building,” making demolition impossible despite the seller’s marketing materials pitching the property as a teardown. Fortem claimed that if it had known this, it wouldn’t have entered into the contract or would have terminated it. The designation led to Jordan being asked to restore or adaptively reuse the structures instead of knocking them down to build on fully vacant land.

Fortem said it had no trouble getting investors on board, but as delays dragged on, the market tightened and a construction lender, which isn’t named in court records, pulled out of the deal.

Now, after nearly two years of litigation, Jordan’s firm and Bemis-Kelley are on the verge of a settlement that could allow the ambitious project to move forward, court records filed this month show. An agreement in principle is coming close to finalization between the parties that would have Fortem buy the property for a little under $7 million in cash, almost half of the original price to which the seller agreed.

But the settlement isn’t yet complete, and could still fall apart, with court hearings set to work through certain details of the deal, records show. In particular, Bemis-Kelley’s side is concerned that Fortem won’t agree to the release of the earnest money ahead of finalizing the settlement and purchase, which the parties are still arguing over this week.

“Fortem has every intention of attempting to finalize the settlement as quickly as possible,” it said in a court filing earlier this month.

Neither Jordan, Bemis-Kelley nor their respective attorneys returned requests for comment.

If Jordan does complete the purchase, it’s unknown whether she would stick with her original plan to build the office building.

While Fortem has a little more than four years before its approval for the project from city council sunsets, Chicago’s office market has been rocky post-pandemic, with record-high vacancy rates exceeding 25 percent. It’s unclear if Jordan could line up an anchor tenant lease that would attract a construction lender to offer debt in time to avoid having to return to the permitting process, or whether the project could proceed on speculation without a tenant in hand before starting construction.

Fulton Market has remained an outlier as Chicago’s hottest commercial real estate neighborhood. Competing developer Fulton Street Companies, along with investors Shanna Khan and JDL, scored a rare construction loan for more than $200 million in late 2023 to build an office building at 919 West Fulton Street, and the firm is now contemplating additional office space in the neighboring Lake Street Lofts building that was previously planned to be turned into a boutique hotel.

Emma Whalen contributed reporting.