Nearly 18 years after selling his real estate company to Mesirow Financial Holdings, Richard “Richie” Stein is leaving the firm to concentrate on a large development near Boston.
Stein will leave Chicago-based Mesirow, where he is a senior managing director, at the end of the year, according to memos sent to employees by Stein and CEO Richard Price. He’s leaving to focus on a 2.3 million-square-foot mixed-use project in Somerville, Mass., just north of Boston.
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Richie Stein leaving Mesirow to focus on Boston-area project
Nearly 18 years after selling his real estate company to Mesirow Financial Holdings, Richard “Richie” Stein is leaving the firm to concentrate on a large development near Boston.
Stein will leave Chicago-based Mesirow, where he is a senior managing director, at the end of the year, according to memos sent to employees by Stein and CEO Richard Price. He’s leaving to focus on a 2.3 million-square-foot mixed-use project in Somerville, Mass., just north of Boston.
A joint venture between Mesirow and Chicago-based Magellan Development Group was chosen in June as master developer for the Union Square project. The venture will work with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority on the redevelopment of the property near the Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts college campuses. A new train station is set to open on the site in 2017, connecting it to downtown Boston.
Stein and Magellan co-CEO James Lowenberg will serve as co-chairmen of the development venture called Union Square Station Associates, or US2, according to the memo.
Stein, 75, will remain based in Chicago, while Greg Karczewski, a Mesirow managing director who also is leaving the firm, will move to the Boston area, according to Stein’s memo to Mesirow employees. Karczewski will be president of US2.
Calls to Stein and a Mesirow spokeswoman were not immediately returned.
CHICAGO PROJECTS
As head of his own firm, Stein & Co., which he founded in 1971, Stein developed projects including the AT&T Corporate Center/USG Building, now known as Franklin Center, the United Center and a McCormick Place expansion.
Mesirow acquired Stein & Co. in 1997, and Stein stayed on at Mesirow to help build up its real estate department. There, he led a venture that developed the 46-story office tower in River North that now houses Mesirow’s headquarters.
That tower, at 353 N. Clark St., sold for $385 million—about what it cost to build—to New York-based Tishman Speyer Properties in 2010. Tishman now has a deal to sell it for just over $700 million to Chicago-based Heitman, in one of the highest-priced office deals in Chicago history.
Mesirow’s latest fund, Mesirow Financial Real Estate Value Fund II, has raised more than $288 million toward a goal of $500 million, according to its most recent filing in September. Mesirow’s first real estate fund closed in 2012 with $379 million, which has been used to buy apartment towers throughout the country, led by Senior Managing Director Alasdair Cripps.