Tabani Group has quietly put Highland Park’s Renaissance Place on the market with an asking price just above $40 million, nearly a decade after buying the downtown mixed-use complex. The property combines street-level retail, multi-story office space and roughly 30 residential units, and is being marketed as largely leased. The listing highlights ongoing investor appetite for stabilized, walkable North Shore retail and mixed-use properties.
Listing and asking price
According to The Real Deal, Tabani is seeking a bit more than $40 million for Renaissance Place and has hired Newmark brokers Keely Polczynski and Conor Lalor to handle the marketing. The offering materials lean heavily on the project’s tenant mix, central downtown location and attached parking garage as key selling points for potential buyers.
Property at a glance
Tabani’s marketing brochure cites roughly 30 luxury apartments and about 519 parking spaces. The property’s online listing features a downloadable offering memorandum and space-availability details through the Newmark/LoopNet page. The package promotes a lineup of street-facing restaurants and shops paired with professional office floors above, and it calls out the center’s walkable access to the Highland Park Metra station.
Price history and ownership
Tabani bought Renaissance Place in 2017 for about $32.7 million after Metzler acquired the complex for roughly $53.1 million in 2006, according to contemporaneous reporting and public records. Those swings in valuation, along with the long-vacant two-story Saks box, have driven multiple repositioning attempts at the site over the past decade.
Redevelopment of the former Saks site
The two-story, roughly 48,000-square-foot former Saks Fifth Avenue store sat empty after 2012 and was later cleared for an 89-unit Albion at Renaissance Place project that secured Highland Park planning approval in 2021, according to city planning materials. That redevelopment tapped air rights over a municipal lot and eliminated a conspicuous vacancy from the downtown retail corridor.
Rents, vacancies and leasing math
The offering memorandum on the Newmark/LoopNet listing shows in-place retail rents averaging about $21.28 per square foot, compared with a submarket average near $24.43. Three vacant shop spaces total roughly 8,000 square feet, and the weighted average lease term sits at about 5.6 years. Taken together, the numbers frame the deal as a play for stable current cash flow with potential upside if leasing can lift rents closer to submarket levels.
What’s next
As The Real Deal notes, Tabani does not appear to be lining up a broader Chicago-area portfolio sale, which points to a targeted disposition of a single property. Buyers are likely to come from regional private investors and funds that favor walkable downtown locations, although any eventual transaction will hinge on how investors judge the long-term outlook for suburban retail and mixed-use centers.
