CommunityAmerica Credit Union v. Liberty 35 Wacker LLC (Leo Burnett Building Foreclosure)

Full write-up

CommunityAmerica Credit Union filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court on November 5, 2026 to foreclose on a roughly $220 million loan, now totaling $236 million with accrued interest and fees, secured by 35 West Wacker Drive, the 50-story, approximately 1.1-million-square-foot office tower in Chicago's Loop better known as the Leo Burnett Building. The borrower, Liberty 35 Wacker LLC, is an affiliate of Opal Holdings, the real estate investment firm controlled by New York-based investor Shaya Prager. It is the latest in a lengthening string of foreclosure actions against Prager's Midwest office holdings and underscores how quickly distress can spread across a single sponsor's portfolio once one lender moves to collect.

The loan landed in CommunityAmerica's hands through acquisition, not origination: the credit union inherited it as part of its merger with Unify Financial Credit Union, which had previously extended credit to Prager-controlled entities, including on a separate Deerfield, Illinois office property. According to the complaint, Liberty 35 Wacker has defaulted on its obligations, and CommunityAmerica is asking the court to appoint a receiver to take control of the building's operations and rent collection while the foreclosure proceeds, a standard move for a lender seeking to preserve collateral value during a contested case.

Prager personally guaranteed the Wacker loan, which ordinarily would expose him to a deficiency claim if the foreclosure sale proceeds fall short of the outstanding balance. He is not, however, named as a defendant in this suit. That omission traces to an involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition that creditors filed against Prager and his wife, Shulamit, in April 2026, which both are contesting; a trial on their motion to dismiss that petition has been set for February. While that case remains pending, the automatic stay that accompanies a bankruptcy filing generally shields Prager from new or continued collection efforts against him personally, even as his corporate borrowing entities remain fair game for secured creditors pursuing collateral directly.

The Wacker foreclosure does not arrive in isolation. Earlier in 2026, GreenState Credit Union, which had itself taken over a loan originally made by Unify Financial Credit Union, foreclosed on Prager's leasehold interest in a Deerfield, Illinois corporate campus. Separately, Wings Federal Credit Union sued Prager over a roughly $41 million loan tied to a Minneapolis-area office complex. Taken together, lenders have already secured more than $122 million in personal judgments against Prager, and CommunityAmerica itself separately holds a roughly $19.1 million foreclosure judgment against a Manhattan property tied to the Pragers. The Wacker suit adds a marquee downtown Chicago tower to that growing list.

35 West Wacker's underlying real estate is not itself distressed in the way a half-empty suburban office park might be. The tower's anchor tenants include Leo Burnett, now under the Publicis umbrella, and the law firm Winston & Strawn, and the building has at times been reported near full occupancy. That makes the case less a story about collapsing demand for the physical asset and more a story about sponsor-level balance sheet stress, where a borrower whose broader portfolio has absorbed multiple defaults, judgments, and now a contested personal bankruptcy can find even a well-leased, well-located building swept into foreclosure once a lender concludes workout negotiations are no longer productive.

The case is a reminder that a personal guaranty's practical value depends heavily on the guarantor's own solvency and litigation posture, since a pending bankruptcy filing can delay collection against an individual guarantor even while a lender proceeds against the borrowing entity and collateral. It also shows that a building's own leasing fundamentals are not a reliable predictor of whether it ends up in foreclosure, that lenders who acquire loan portfolios through mergers inherit the sponsor relationships behind them along with the receivables, and that owners and lenders tracking a sponsor across multiple properties should treat a new foreclosure filing as a signal to review cross-default and cross-collateralization provisions in their own loan documents with that same sponsor, since distress has shown a documented tendency to cascade across a single borrower's holdings once it becomes public.

Case timeline