When Verna Clayton took over as village clerk of Buffalo Grove in 1971, the first business application she processed was that of Stanley Lieberman, who was seeking to open his first real estate office.
Today Clayton, now the mayor of the northwest suburban village, is happy that the application sailed through.
After hanging out his freshly minted license over a small office in an old cheese factory on Dundee Road, Lieberman has parlayed his one-man operation into a diversifed real estate company that grew along with the village itself.
Lieberman`s real estate acumen proved to be a boon for Buffalo Grove. He was one of the key players that brought to fruition a 17-year-old plan to create what amounts to an instant downtown for the village.
With the first residents now moving into the residential portion of the Buffalo Grove Town Center, village officials are beginning to see the payoff for the years of waiting.
”We tried all kinds of things to attract someone to develop the Town Center,” Clayton said. ”I talked to any number of developers to try and get them interested. At one time, I asked Stan to give me some advice on assembling the property, what the village could do to make it easier.”
”Little did I know that it would be Stan who would come in and eventually assemble it,” she said.
”In my own mind, when he was the one to come forward, I knew he had the best interests of the village in mind. Sure, it was a business deal. But I felt he understood what it was the village needed,” Clayton said.
It was the early 1970s when Buffalo Grove village officials designated the 55-acre triangular parcel north of Lake-Cook Road between Illinois Highway 83 and Buffalo Grove Road as the site for a town center.
Fifteen years later, the parcel was still vacant when Lieberman purchased 7 1/2 acres on the north end and asked for permission to build a small shopping center. But the plan commission wanted the larger project built and told Lieberman so.
”The village created a golden egg (by designating the land). It took us 2 1/2 years to mold all the pieces together and bring it through zoning. As we worked our way down (buying parcels) from the north end to the south end, the land became extremely expensive,” he said.
Seymour Taxman also was working to assemble the land. Taxman contacted Melvin Simon & Associates, one of the nation`s largest shopping center developers, and got the company interested in the project as well.
When the village agreed to aid the project with a $7.5 million tax increment financing bond, Simon signed on as co-developer. With Lieberman, Taxman and Simon working in combination, the last of the land purchses were closed and the project got rolling.
Under the TIF plan, increased tax revenues from the new development are used to pay off bonds issued to fund public improvements to the site, including the construction and maintenance of a public park and village green and bandshell.
Lieberman, in turn, formed a new partnership and bought back the land for Town Place. Simon and Taxman continued as developers of the retail portion.
”I just wish it was all up and running,” Clayton said. ”I know it`s in its infancy and it will take a number of years to mature. But patience is what I sometimes run short of.”
The first phase of the retail portion of the project opened in late 1988, but construction has not started on the second phase.
The village green, a public square area, officially opened in June. At the ceremony marking the event, the village announced that Buffalo Grove would get its own post office, which will be located on Town Center land.
The 26,000-square-foot facility, which will open later this year, will sooth one of the sore spots felt in Buffalo Grove, where residents have for years complained of sharing a post office and ZIP code with adjacent Wheeling. In addition, a congregate care facility and some office space is also part of the overall site plan.
For Lieberman, the Town Center is just the latest in a string of firsts that he has been involved in in the village. In many ways, his experiences mirror those of many others who have participated in the growth and development of the one-time sleepy bedroom community.
Lieberman moved to Buffalo Grove from New Jersey in 1968. He was working for a photographic company on the East Coast at the time and was transferred to the Chicago area.
”Coming out of the East, I didn`t know much about Chicago. But I did know Levitt Homes. I knew they were building model homes in New Jersey and that they were building the same houses here. So I bought one over the phone. I could have bought in Naperville, for all I knew,” Lieberman said.
Levitt, the legendary home builder who helped shape the suburban boom after World War II, built hundreds of units in Buffalo Grove beginning shortly after the village`s incorporation in 1958.
”Levitt attracted a lot of people from the East Coast because they knew the name,” Lieberman said. ”There were a tremendous amount of transferees in those days, many from large companies that were establishing offices in the Chicago area.”
”I was maybe the 11th or 12th buyer to come into the subdivision. Buffalo Grove really was a small town, with about 4,500 people. But a lot of them were relatively active in what they were doing, and within a year or two I got active, too,” Lieberman said.
Lieberman became the first police and fire commissioner in the village, not out of any particular love for public safety work but because he felt ”I may as well do something.”
The village had eight police officers in those days. Today it has 75. The population has grown to about 35,000 by village officials` estimates.
At the same time he started his realty firm, Lieberman decided that Buffalo Grove needed its own Chamber of Commerce. He recruited 12 local businesses to start the chamber. Today, there are 75 members.
One of the other things Buffalo Grove was missing in those early days was a synagogue. Lieberman and three other men set out to gauge the interest in establishing a new temple in Buffalo Grove, using some rather unorthodox marketing techniques.
”We drove through the neighborhoods reading the names on the mailboxes. We wrote down any that had Jewish sounding names and then mailed them information,” Lieberman said.
About 30 members of the fledgling Beth Judea Congregation met for the first time in donated space at the Holiday Inn in Rolling Meadows. Today, the congregation numbers about 500 and meets in its own synagogue on Illinois Highway 83 near the Long Grove-Buffalo Grove border.
Now there are five synagogues in the immediate vicinity, including a reformed temple that split off from Beth Judea about five years after it was formed.
While Lieberman was helping Buffalo Grove grow on the civic front, his real estate firm was flying high in the business arena.
”We took off very quickly. There were only four of us in real estate at the time in Buffalo Grove, and our company in a year or two did come to dominate the market,” Lieberman said.
”Now there are 13 companies in the area and the market has been splintered,” said Lieberman, who is also now president of the Lieberman Group Ltd.
In the late 1970s, Lieberman jumped on the condominium conversion bandwagon, turning Buffalo Grove apartment projects, like the 330-unit Arbors and the 336-unit Villa Verdi, into ownership communities. Within a span of three years, he converted more than 3,000 units across the metropolitan area. One of Lieberman`s top employees in those heady years of condo conversions was Florence Jacobs, who went on to sales success with MCL Development at such in-city projects as the Embassy Club and Dearborn Park II. Jacobs, who had been selling the American Invesco conversion of 2 E. Oak St. in Chicago, was hired by Lieberman to handle the sales for 1400 N. State Pkwy. around the corner.
”Right away I liked him,” Jacobs said. ”He was smart because he let the marketing person price the conversions, he allowed me to price it so we could sell to the people who were living there, which makes it much easier.” ”He had me look at a project that he was considering in the city, at the architects plans, and I said it was not do-able. He listened. He didn`t get mad. He doesn`t have a big ego and he`s really not greedy,” she said.
Jacobs worked with Lieberman until 1983, when his firm completed the conversion and sale of Villa Verdi. The project was a first for the city-oriented Jacobs.
”You might think it was funny that I was all the way out in Buffalo Grove. But we got it all converted,” she said.
The Villa Verdi conversion was accomplished in a condo market that had pretty much dried up in the early 1980s.
”People who have gone through bad times understand how to be careful. It`s not that they are worriers, but that they know not to go crazy. That`s how Stan is. I`ll probably go back to work for him one day,” Jacobs said.
Lieberman said his firm has recently returned to the arena, converting three small projects in Mount Prospect, Palatine and Naperville.
”I really like condo conversion,” Lieberman said. ”You get in and you get out. It has a big advantage over new construction where you have to cope with zoning and timing delays or things like a bricklayers` strike.”
The Lieberman Group, Lieberman`s diversified real estate company, includes divisions that specialize in conversion, management, marketing, commercial real estate and development. Red Carpet Lieberman is a residential brokerage firm with 10,000 square feet of office space in the Town Center.
Lieberman, who is also a former president of the Northwest Suburban Board of Realtors and the MAP Multiple Listings Service, now lives in Long Grove. But his livelihood is as tied to Buffalo Grove today as ever.
”The real estate climate in Buffalo Grove is one of the strongest in the Midwest. It`s a great town with great services that makes a great place to bring up kids,” he said.
Through the first six months of the year, permits had been issued for 277 single-family homes and 119 units of multifamily housing in Buffalo Grove, ranking the village fourth on the list of suburban housing leaders, according to Bell Federal Savings and Loan`s monthly survey of building. The village has ranked in the top five for most of the 1980s.
”Buffalo Grove used to be a stopping off point for white-collar, junior workers who wanted to move up to the North Shore,” Lieberman said. ”But Buffalo Grove has become a destination, and much of the traffic we`re seeing is from Buffalo Grove itself.”
The residential portion of the Town Center, called Town Place, will contain 63 townhouses in 11 buildings and 88 condominiums in two mid-rise buildings. So far, 12 of the townhouses, some of which are completed, and 15 of the condominiums, which are still under construction, have been sold.
”The community is so close-knit,” said Terry Dolensek-Kersen, Town Place sales manager. ”People come in just to find out who`s buying and to check the architecture. People in Buffalo Grove have waited quite a long time for this.”
The townhouses are priced from $177,990 to $276,990 and the condos from $129,990 to $211,490. Eleven floor plans are available ranging in size from 1,600 to 3,500 square feet.
Town Place, with it brick and limestone construction and Georgian and Renaissance architecture, has more of an urban feel than most of the other residential projects it competes with in the suburbs.
”The idea was to create something for Lincoln Park or Lake View people, who want that urban lifestyle but who have to work in the suburbs,” Lieberman said.
The townhouse buyers tend to be younger professional singles or couples, Dolensek-Kersen said, while the condo buyers are more likely older couples moving from larger houses to the east or from Buffalo Grove.
Several units have been purchased by the parents of current village residents, she said.
Jacobs said Lieberman`s Town Place compares favorably to the urban projects she has been selling these days. Although its architecture and materials seem to be out of character with the surrounding subdivision-style housing, she said Town Place can succeed because the development as a whole-including the shopping center and public spaces-is well conceived.
