Trying to sell or rent a piece of property nowadays is hard enough. But when you have giant gas tanks buried underground that need to be removed or remediated, it’s just adding fuel to the fire.
Several prominent properties in or near Oak Park — which were formerly used as gas stations — have languished over recent years. And developers looking to sell those parcels admit that sealing the deal gets harder when you add old gas pumps to the mix.
The former Shell station at the northwest corner of Madison and Harlem in Forest Park was almost a Walgreens. But the deal fell through and the drugstore ended up at Madison and Oak Park Avenue, instead. Real estate broker Ted Parris has been trying for the past four years to unload the property, but to no avail.
They’ve dropped the price by a million, down to $1.5 million, and have started renting it out for parking to Rush Oak Park Hospital, hoping to at least get some income streaming in. Shell cleaned up the property before vacating, said Parris, gaining the coveted “no further remediation” letter from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. But still, there’s a stigma there when people hear that it was formerly a gas station.
“A lot of people will call and be all worried about it, but I’m like, ‘Good news,'” he said, later adding, “It’s definitely a concern for some people.”
Navigating the waters of remediating an old gas station is complicated, which is why some property owners hire guys like Nick Cuzzone, president of EPS Environmental Services Inc. He works for banks and developers, helping them to determine whether cleanup is needed before selling former gas station sites.
Regulations are less stringent if the property is being developed for a commercial or industrial use, versus as an apartment or condo. Tanks installed after 1974 generally need to be removed, though they can be filled or covered if built before 1974.
Sometimes sellers remediate the soil themselves, other times they discount the price to give the buyer more dough to fix up the property. Either way, sellers might have to wait awhile to get rid of their land.
“It’s hard enough. When you see vacant lots that aren’t contaminated, nobody wants to develop them,” Cuzzone said. “It’s even worse with contaminated sites.”
Another such site is the abandoned Petro station at 901 Madison St. in Oak Park. The property has been mired in foreclosure since 2007 and is currently owned by Harris Bank. It’s being listed on the market for $480,000, according to spokesman Patrick O’Herlihy, who acknowledged that selling a defunct gas station is more difficult than a typical commercial property.
A former BP station at 801 S. Oak Park Ave. has also been on the market for a spell, since the business closed last summer. But they’ve had more luck, as the property is currently under contract, according to Phil Brasse, an asset manager for CIMA Developers Inc. He declined to say, yet, what will take the BP’s place, but said he hopes to get permits to remove the underground gas tank in the near future.
He, too, said the former gas use muddied things up. “Certainly,” he said. “There are environmental issues that need to be resolved, and very few people want to get involved with that.”
David King, an Oak Park-based commercial real estate broker, thinks the bigger problem is that nobody is building new construction of any sort in the current economy.
“The hurdle is not the environmental; the hurdle is the economy,” he said.