WORLD PROPERTY CHANNEL ®

(CHICAGO, IL) -- Prominent developers and investors in luxury condominium homes are camping out today at the Chicago headquarters of Corus Bankshares Inc., waiting for an opportunity to buy some of Corus's troubled real estate assets, according to the Chicago Tribune.
 
Lining up to bid on some of the assets are The Related Cos. of Miami, Related Group of New York City, Lubert Adler Group of Philadelphia, Colony Capital, iStar and Starwood Capital. 

Corus Bank has been hard hit by the real estate downturn in Nevada and Florida.

Industry watchers expect the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to seize the institution this month.  Corus Bank, the operating subsidiary of Corus Bankshares Inc., has been one of the nation's most aggressive lenders to condo developers and investors.

The FDIC had given Corus a June 18, 2009 deadline to raise more capital.  However, in a previously released July statement, the bank said it was "critically undercapitalized" and "highly unlikely" to raise capital without the FDIC's help in brokering a deal.

The newspaper reports former Corus Bankshares Inc. chairman Joseph Glickman, 94, has already sold most of his stock in the bank.

Glickman, a former Minnesota resident, sold 3.9 million common shares from Aug. 20 through Aug. 26 for an average price of 31 cents a share, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The  Joseph C. Glickman Foundation dumped 800,000 shares of common stock from June 22 to Aug. 28.

That leaves Glickman and his Foundation with 544,762 shares, or 1 percent of the company. As of March 9,  2009,  they had owned 9.7 percent of Corus, according to the SEC.  The Glickman family until recently had owned nearly 45 percent of the bank.

In April, Joseph Glickman resigned from the bank as chairman and director, and his son Robert resigned as CEO and director.

Robert Glickman

Robert and his brother, Edward, also have been reducing their Corus stakes. Edward's stake has dropped to 7.1 percent Wednesday from 11.7 percent in March, and Robert's to 4.3 percent from 23 percent, according to their filings with the SEC.

Glickman came to Chicago in 1966,bought out a $20 million-asset lender and grew the institution to a $7.07 billion-asset Corus Bank, according to the Tribune. 

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