Aug. 2--It sounded like a desirable place to live: a 21-story luxury condominium project with 275 residential units, a spa, private club and a rooftop terrace with pool overlooking the Strip in Las Vegas.

Called Streamline Tower, it was one of about a dozen big-ticket projects that Corus Bankshares Inc., a lender headquartered 1,700 miles away in Chicago, financed there over the past five years.

But in April, Streamline Tower LLC filed for bankruptcy, having sold only 27 units, and what at one time seemed like a solid bet stung Corus as the sole bank financing the project's $123.1 million construction loan.

Corus, owed $108.2 million for that 2006 loan and bogged down by other condominium construction and conversion credits gone bad, has told investors that its auditor has warned that the bank could fail. A June 18 deadline imposed by regulators for Corus to raise capital has long passed, and many believe it's only a matter of time before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seizes the lender, which on Friday warned that it was "critically undercapitalized."

But a major hurdle for the federal regulator is that $7.07 billion-asset Corus, with only 14 offices in the Chicago area, has operated more like a real estate investment company than a traditional bank.

As a result, bankers like John Kanas, chief executive of BankUnited, believe the FDIC would have a tough time finding banks eager to swallow Corus whole.

"There's no franchise value to the bank at all," he said, citing its limited branch network, a reliance on high-cost deposits and an unsustainable business model.

"It was a bank created around the asset side of the balance sheet: 'Let's go make a lot of loans and figure out a way to fund them later,' instead of a bank that had a valuable franchise of deposit collection and was looking for a place to put those deposits," Kanas said.

Ben Shapiro, a Belongia Shapiro & Hynes lawyer and former chief legal counsel for the FDIC in the Midwest, said, "The fact that there is so much uncertainty about the bank's loans, as well as its relatively large size, makes it less certain that another bank would bid for Corus."

Some believe it might make sense for real estate firms or private-equity funds to make a play for Corus' troubled assets because investments in distressed real estate might pay off in a year or two as the market rebounds.

Many private-equity firms and other investment funds are flush with cash and have expressed interest in buying failed insured banks.