CHICAGO—On Tuesday, GlobeSt.com reported that Chicago-based Urban Innovations, a company with deep roots in the River North neighborhood, had repurchased, at a significantly lower price, several office buildings in the West Loop's Greektown neighborhood that the firm had sold to another investor in 2005. Today, Mike Scilingo, president of Urban Innovations, explains how this came about, and how the commercial real estate markets in River North and Greektown can impact one another.

“We were swimming upstream,” says Scilingo of the time when the company first bought and began leasing 322 S. Green St. and 833 W. Jackson Blvd. about one mile west of the Loop. It was the late 1990's, and the tech bubble was bursting, undercutting the very businesses the loft-style offices were designed to attract. The market eventually stabilized, he adds. Still, the buildings never quite achieved from an investment standpoint what Urban Innovations had thought possible when the boom was on.

But by 2005, the buildings, which share a parking lot, “were marketable from a cash-flow perspective.” And when an out-of-town investor offered to buy both for about $18 million, Scilingo says they jumped at the chance. The purchaser “was looking to get into the Chicago market, and we thought, 'now we can focus on River North,'” the company's historic base of operations. Urban Innovations was one of the pioneering developers that began buying River North property and developing it into office space in the 1970's, when the area still had a scruffy feel.