Condor Partners Hit with Foreclosure for Old Town Site

Just after putting out one distress fire, Chicago developer Sol Barket is trying to extinguish more flames as a second lender closes in on a stalled Old Town development site.

For more than five years, Barket’s firm Condor Partners has eyed building a 12-story hotel he wants to call the “Duke of Wells” on the property at 1520-1528 North Wells Street. Condor got a demolition permit last year to tear down a three-story structure on 1520 North Wells.

But the developer is now being dinged with a foreclosure lawsuit, the second it has faced on a major commercial redevelopment project in Chicago in recent months.

Canadian lender CIBC Bank claims it’s owed more than $10.2 million after Condor and Barket, who guaranteed the loan, defaulted on the debt back in 2021. The loan was originally provided in 2018, and was modified several times to give the borrower more time to pay it off.

Condor also took on additional debt against the Wells Street property the same year, with a $4 million junior loan from Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust. That portion of the debt package has been modified a whopping 15 times since 2020 to provide Barket and his firm more time to pay it off, public records show.

Condor has been scrambling to save its 203-key hotel proposal for the last four years. The plan was altered in 2024 to add a few more rooms and tweak a few other design elements, after it was granted initial approval back in 2020.

Its efforts on the hotel plan coincided with a rescue attempt — which recently proved successful — for a project in the Pilsen neighborhood called Mural Park that converted two former lumber storage warehouses into loft offices and a brewery.

Condor is confident it can pull off a similar deal to avoid losing the Old Town property to its lender.

“As demonstrated with Mural Park, we are deeply committed to our developments and to finding paths forward even in challenging circumstances,” the developer said in a statement to The Real Deal. “We respect that the banking industry has its protocols; however, we remain focused on the long-term potential of the project and are actively working on solutions to move it ahead.”

While Mural Park scored an early win with a lease to insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield’s corporate parent Health Care Service Corp. for the entire 105,000-square-foot building at 920 West Cullerton Street, the 116,000-square-foot building at 924 West 19th Place was still vacant at the start of the pandemic, and funding stalled for the costs of leasing to additional tenants.

Mural Park’s lender Ready Capital filed a $33 million foreclosure lawsuit against Condor’s ownership of Mural Park in 2023, but earlier this month, the developer landed a $27 million loan for the property from Connecticut-based Northlight Capital Partners and negotiated a discounted loan payoff with Ready.

In Old Town, Condor paid $15 million for the property in 2018, when it was sold by a land trust that obscured the identity of the seller. The developer originally borrowed $7.7 million from CIBC, on top of the $4 million from Metropolitan. But with interest and other fees, the outstanding principal on the CIBC loan is only down to $7.5 million, while there’s another $2.7 million in interest and other charges owed as of the end of March, according to CIBC’s lawsuit.

Condor also still has to pay back its architect on the project, Pappageorge Haymes Partners, which initially filed a mechanic’s lien on the property in 2023 alleging it was owed about $300,000 for its work on a $2.2 million contract for the property.

The architect’s lien remains active, and so does a separate lien recorded against the property by National Wrecking Co. earlier this month for over $33,000-worth of work it claims it performed for the property and remains owed.