D-26 Looks To Brokerage Firm for Sale of Maplewood

The finance committee has recommend that the Board of Education approve a broker agreement with Colliers’ International to help sale the Maplewood School site.

At the Monday night committee meeting, Vernon Schultz, who works out of the  Colliers’ International Rosemont office, said there’s a very high demand for multi-family residential property along the .

Schultz said it’s harder to find six or seven acres of land for developers to complete a large project and with the limited supply of property near Metra lines, there will be a great deal of interest in the Maplewood property.

Even though the international firm has lists of multi-family developers and charter school organizations, Schulz has recommended that the district utilize Whittaker Associates, which is a third-party vendor, with real-time personnel information of potential buyers.

Board member Floyd Myers said when personally dealing with a broker, that broker would have all the expertise and customers looking for this type of property. 

“Given the current economic conditions that are in the country today and the difficulty of getting financing, I would want us to be casting as wide as possible net,” Schulz said. “Our list is maybe updated on an annual basis and the Whittaker database [is] updated almost daily.”

Board member Scott Coffey asked about the impact Whittaker would have on the selling process.

Schulz said instead of spending time building the list of buyers, his firm could be talking directly to the buyers.

The district could delay the option of using Whittaker but it takes 20 to 30 days to build the buyers’ list, which would eat into the 120-day time frame of selling Maplewood.

The Whittaker database service would cost the district $5,000 but would be returned, if the sale of the property were successful, Schulz said.

.

Possible uses for the property could be a charter school. Or the school could be knocked down to make way for the construction of a retail or residential development.