Valli Produce Bags $20 Million Profit From Sale Of Evanston Plaza

EVANSTON, IL — The owners of Valli Produce recently sold the shopping center where their Evanston store is located for more than $20 million more than they paid for it less than six years earlier.

Bon Aviv Investments, an Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey-based real estate investment firm, paid $36.18 million for Evanston Plaza in a deal that closed April 29, according to Cook County property records. As part of the sale, Valli will maintain its lease at the property.

The 16.35-acre shopping center at the southwest corner of Dempster Street and Dodge Avenue last changed hands in 2014, when Chicago-based Bonnie Investment Group sold it to Valli's owners for $16 million.

Bonnie Investment had snapped up the property for just $8.1 million in 2011 after it was the subject of foreclosure proceedings under its previous owner, Joseph Freed and Associates. Freed lost the plaza after putting it up as collateral to finance a failed Chicago project that eventually collapsed amid a fraud scandal, with its former president sent to federal prison until a judge last year granted him compassionate release during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2012, the City Council voted to make the shopping center into the Dempster Dodge tax increment financing, or TIF, district, allowing for property tax revenue resulting from increases to the property's assessed value to be diverted to aid its redevelopment.

But at the end of 2013, anchor tenant Dominick's shuttered its grocery store at the shopping center. As of the next summer, its leasing agent said Evanston Plaza was about 68 percent vacant.

After Valli Produce bought the property in 2014, the City Council agreed to grant it a $2 million forgiveable loan to help finance the cost of redeveloping the plaza.

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The lone vote against the loan agreement was former 4th Ward Ald. Don Wilson, who also voted against creating the TIF district. He suggested Bonnie was able to walk away with the money that should have been used to redevelop the site.

"It should be noted that the original purchaser got the property at an auction for $8 million and change and sold it for $16 million," Wilson said at the time. "That’s the margin that perhaps ought to have been utilized for the development, so the idea that there wasn’t money in the property for redevelopment, to me, falls flat.”

Valli opened at the plaza in July 2015 and was an immediate hit with residents.

In April 2019, Valli pledged $250,000 over a 15-year period to the Friends of Robert Crown Center nonprofit group to fund the creation of the city's new community center in exchange for naming rights to the center's lobby.

The property was listed for sale last year with a $39 million asking price.

At a December Joint Review Board meeting of the representatives of all taxing bodies covering the Dempster Dodge TIF district, city staff said Valli's owners planned to use the cash from the sale to pay down mortgages on other properties, the Evanston RoundTable reported.

The TIF is currently set to expire in 2025. As of last year, increased property values at the shopping center had generated more than $300,000 for the TIF fund since 2012, with about 40 percent of that coming last year.

The 2020 estimated market value of the property was about $17.75 million, according to the Cook County Assessor's Office.

According to marketing materials for the property from its new manager, Johnstown, Pennsylvania-based A2Z Real Estate, there are only three vacant storefronts remaining in the shopping center.

The approximately 105,000 people who live within a 2-mile radius of the shopping center have an average household income of $134,700, according to the marketing material.

In addition to Valli, other major tenants include AutoZone, Blink Fitness, Dance Center Evanston, DaVita, Dollar Tree, Goodwill and Pet Supply Plus.