Editors’ Weekly News Roundup February 3 – February 7
A grocery-anchored retail center is a sure thing in terms of generating shopper traffic, rental income—and financing. Case in point: Danada Square West, a 314,819-square-foot Jewel Osco-anchored shopping center in the affluent Chicago suburb of Wheaton, IL, which recently secured a $41.65-million loan. Connect CRE’s reporting of this transaction, with the headline JLL Arranges $42M for Jewel-Osco Anchored Retail Center in Wheaton, was our most-read story of the past week.
The story was one of two in the past week’s top five that focused on retail and one of two on Chicago-area transactions. The second Chicago story in the top five, ranking third overall, was also one of two that pertained to the apartment sector. In second place, though, was a national story on the current state of multifamily.
U.S. Multifamily Fundamentals Continue to Strengthen derived from a CBRE report that illustrated the sector’s resilience. Amid an elevated number of deliveries, positive absorption in the last three months of 2024 represented the strongest fourth-quarter performance since CBRE began keeping track. This translated into substantial year-over-year gains in investment sale volume.
Staying with the residential theme and returning to the Chicago region, our third most-read story of the past week detailed the completion of an affordable housing project at a long-vacant site on Chicago’s West Side. Readers learned in Skender Completes Construction on East Garfield Park Housing Complex that the project, Fifth City Commons, rose on a site selected by the City of Chicago as part of the global C40 Reinventing Competition for Cities.
The competition encourages municipalities around the world to use vacant land for sustainable, net-zero redevelopment. Accordingly, construction manager Skender built the 43-unit project to Passive House standards of sustainable energy use.
Moving from the heartland to the East Coast, a Marcus & Millichap sale transaction provided the week’s fourth most-read story. BJ’s Wholesale Club in Bangor Trades to National REIT reported that the 91,828-square-foot retail property drew interest from several institutional investors.
In the end, said Marcus & Millichap’s Adam Cohen, “We selected a buyer who owns multiple BJs locations nationwide and whom we knew would operate quickly and efficiently in closing this deal, which is exactly what they did.”
Farther down the coast, a partnership of Hines and the Aubrey Corporation was the basis for the week’s fifth most-read story, Hines-Led Team Building Massive Bartow County Mixed-Use Village. Encompassing nearly 2,400 acres in northwest Georgia, the development will include up to 10 million square feet of new manufacturing, data center and logistics facilities, along with shops, restaurants, hotels and a diverse offering of residential properties.
The headlines on Connect CRE’s regional and national pages have included numerous stories of retail chains filing for bankruptcy, perhaps with liquidation as the near-term objective. In spite of this, retail is experiencing sub-5% vacancy rates in many markets. For insights on this seeming contradiction, be sure to read our Weekender story on the retail space shortage, and sign up to receive the Weekender mailing if you’re not receiving it already.