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Shopping Centers Today -> March 2002
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FROM AFTER-SCHOOL PROJECT TO CLASS ACT
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| Joe Cosenza |
The Inland Real Estate Group of Companies, which has grown to become one of the industry’s 25 largest U.S. developers by gross leasable area (GLA), according to ICSC’s ranking, had one of the unlikeliest beginnings.
The enterprise began 33 years ago as a side project of four Chicago public school teachers. Since then it has grown into a comprehensive real estate services firm that offers real estate and financial companies brokerage, mortgage financing, property management, syndication, land development and other services.
“We decided we wanted to do something on the side,” said Joe Cosenza, the company’s vice chairman. “As a part-time [business] we got into real estate, selling houses. We had no money, so we had to go to friends and family and collect money to finance every transaction we did.”
The other three founders are Dan Goodwin, chairman; Robert Parks, senior vice president; and Robert Baum, general counsel and executive vice president. Goodwin, Cosenza and Parks had attended college together at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. Goodwin and Baum, meanwhile, met while teaching at the same school.
After six years of running Inland as a side business, the four quit teaching and began running the company full time. Now the firm has more than 800 employees working for a whole family of companies, including two retail REITs and Inland Mortgage Investment. The company owns interests in several small banks and, besides retail, is heavily invested in apartment and condominium assets in the Chicago area.
“Throughout all of the 1970s we bought apartment buildings and built apartment
buildings,” Cosenza said. “At the end of the decade we
learned what condominiums were. By the mid 1980s there was a public
awareness of us. All during those years we did transactions on a
private basis and mostly did transactions with Illinois investors
and properties.
“Then we started going national and did our first offering open to every state in the country. That got our name out.”
During the real estate crunch of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Inland focused on land deals.
“We realized, looking at the bottom 5 percent or 10 percent of our portfolio, that something needed to be done,” Cosenza said. “In some cases the properties were not worth the debt we had on them.”
Despite the gravity of the situation, however, “we made the conscious decision not to let any of our investors lose any money,” he added. The company looked for opportunities to complete property exchanges to upgrade its assets and often paid out of its own pocket.
When the market stabilized, Inland entered the retail real estate industry.
The firm formed Inland Real Estate Corp. to cover its Midwest portfolio. In 1999 it formed the Inland Retail Real Estate Trust, which is building a portfolio in the Southeast United States.
“Overall, in this group of companies, we’re probably the largest manager
and owner of apartments in the Chicago area,” Cosenza said.
“We’re the largest community center owner in the area
and the largest developers of land.”
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— D.B.
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 | Current Issue November 2008 |