Germania Club building sold to shopping center firm
(Crain's) — A unit of Kimco Realty Corp., the New York-based shopping center giant, has paid $9.3 million for the historic Germania Club building in Old Town.
 The Germania Club building. CoStar Group Inc. photo. |
The Kimco unit bought the 57,000-square-foot building from an affiliate of Chicago-based Realty & Mortgage Co., says Lee Kiser, principal of Kiser Group, the Chicago-based brokerage firm hired to sell the property.
Completed in 1889, the building at 108 W. Germania Place functioned as a social club for German immigrants for roughly a century. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
Yet when Realty & Mortgage bought the property about 20 years ago, "the membership had dwindled down to a couple dozen" people, Mr. Kiser says.
The firm launched a major renovation of the property, whose tenants now include an Ace hardware store, a Thai restaurant, a Starbucks and a preschool. It leases the building's two large ballrooms to a third-party operator, who rents the space out for weddings, banquets and other events.
Kimco acquired the property at a capitalization rate, or first-year yield, of about 7%, Mr. Kiser says. The building was listed at $9.5 million.
It's an unusual acquisition for Kimco, a real estate investment trust and the largest U.S. shopping center owner, with a 180-million-square-foot portfolio across 45 states. The purchase was made by a Kimco unit that specializes in urban infill mixed-use properties, Mr. Kiser says.
Kimco and Realty & Mortgage executives did not return calls late Tuesday afternoon.
The Germania Club was formed in 1865, when a group of German-American Civil War veterans got together to perform a concert in honor of slain President Abraham Lincoln. The building itself opened 24 years later.
The club gained notoriety in 1958, when a raid on the property ordered by Mayor Richard J. Daley resulted in the confiscation of 15 slot machines there, according to a 1985 Chicago Tribune story.
