Unable To Land Tenants, Columbia Property Trust Turning Over Naperville OfficeMax Building To Servicer
Columbia Property Trust is turning over ownership of a Naperville office building to the loan servicer, unable to find a replacement for its biggest tenant. The $49M loan on 263 Shuman Blvd. is due in July, according to Crain's Chicago Business. But OfficeMax/Office Depot, which used the 354k SF building as its HQ, left the building in Q2 2015.
Columbia still collected rent on the space, but the lease expires on May 31. The building is valued at $24M, meaning Columbia owes more on the loan than what the building is worth, and it will not be able to refinance the debt to pay it off before the mortgage is due. This is one of the largest distressed properties in the Chicago office market and is an outlier in a suburban office sector that rebounded strongly in the past couple of years.
The loan servicer, C-III Asset Management, will now attempt to find tenants or sell the building. This is one of three office assets Columbia retained when it announced the sale of an 11-building portfolio in July 2015. C-III holds a $57M portion of debt on Lakewood Center in Hoffman Estates, which is one of the Chicago market's biggest post-crash foreclosures.
