The family that owns the Chicago Blackhawks has sold a 139-unit apartment complex on the city’s North Side in a deal completed just weeks after unveiling plans for a $7 billion development around the hockey team’s arena.
A Wirtz Corp. real estate affiliate last month sold connected 12- and 15-story buildings with entrances at 535 W. Cornelia Ave. and 534 W. Stratford Place in the Lakeview neighborhood for $22.5 million, according to Cook County property records.
The buyer was Chicago-based FMA Properties, which was backed in the deal by a Fannie Mae loan of just over $18.2 million from Greystone, according to county records.
The Lakeview property had been among several apartment properties that the Wirtz family has owned for many decades, or in this case nearly a century.
It is a small sale relative to the size of the Wirtz family’s overall real estate portfolio — even smaller when considering what the Wirtz family and the Reinsdorfs, owners of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, have planned around the United Center on the Near West Side.
The families, co-owners of the arena that opened in 1994, in July announced plans for a sprawling mixed-use development on 55 acres around the United Center.
Pending city approval, the plan is to build about 5,000 residential units along with a music hall, hotel rooms, retail, restaurants and new green space on what is now largely a sea of surface parking lots. It is called the 1901 Project, a reference to the arena’s address at 1901 W. Madison St. west of the Loop business district.
Danny Wirtz, chairman and CEO of the Blackhawks, described the public unveiling of the plan in July as “bittersweet,” coming almost exactly a year after the death of his father and the team’s longtime leader, Rocky Wirtz.
The Wirtz family is best known as the longtime owners of the NHL’s Blackhawks, whose three most recent Stanley Cup championships came in 2010, 2013 and 2015, but much of the family’s fortune has been made in real estate.
Arthur Wirtz formed holding company Wirtz Corp. as a real estate venture in 1926, according to the company’s website. He began the family’s lucrative liquor distribution business in 1945. That business, now known as Breakthru Beverage Group, is one of the largest of its kind in the nation.
Family Holdings
The family owned about 1,200 apartment units on Chicago’s North Side as of July 2023, when Rocky Wirtz — Arthur’s grandson, who had led the family’s business — died in July 2023 at age 70, Crain’s Chicago Business reported at the time. Danny Wirtz then took over as chairman and president of Wirtz Corp.
Some properties have been sold off in recent years, including a more than $35 million sale of a portfolio of buildings in nearby Evanston, Illinois, in a deal completed just a few months before Rocky Wirtz’s death. That followed sales in preceding years in neighborhoods including Lincoln Square and Rogers Park.
Wirtz Realty still owns several other properties in Lakeview, which is home to the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field.
The property the family just sold is nearly 98% leased, according to CoStar data.
“We are always evaluating our portfolio and the decision to sell this property was a result of that,” Don Vitek, managing broker and senior vice president at Wirtz Realty, said in a statement emailed to CoStar News. “It was in no way connected to the 1901 Project.”
The buyer, FMA Properties, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CoStar News.
Interest in buying the Cornelia Stratford building was strong, including dozens of property tours, said one of the brokers who marketed it for sale, Bill Montana of Global Real Estate Advisors.
A location near Belmont Harbor and a wide range of unit sizes, from less than 300 square feet to nearly 3,000, boosted the property’s value even amid a broader slowdown in deals because of rising interest rates and other factors, Montana said.
“There’s good rent growth in that area, 4% to 6%, and there are a lot of longtime owners,” Montana said. “When a property like this comes to the market, people want to take advantage of an opportunity in a market that doesn’t see a lot of trades.”
For the Record
The seller was represented by Global Real Estate Advisors brokers Bill Montana and Christopher Sackley.