Chicago Real Estate News & Neighborhood Notes - April, 2022

Thousands of New Apartments Planned For West Loop

Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood is on track to add more than 9,000 new apartments. If all goes as planned, reports suggest it could mean more new apartments in the West Loop than the combined total of all of the city’s other downtown neighborhoods.

Apartment development has really taken off in the Fulton Market District in recent years. There are currently about 19 multi-family developments either in the planning stage or already under construction in the district.

New residential development is perhaps the latest phase for Fulton Market, which has recently welcomed in a number of major companies and corporate headquarters. One of the latest apartment projects, meanwhile, is a 30-story building located at 160 N Morgan Street.

The developer behind it is…

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New Apartment Tower Planned For Streeterville

A new apartment tower could be coming to Streeterville. The planned high-rise sits just one block east of the Magnificent Mile on a corner lot that’s currently occupied by a parking garage.

Mavrek Development is joining with GW Properties and Luxury Living Chicago Realty to build the 21-story apartment building at the corner of North St Clair Street and East Grand Avenue. Chicago architecture firm NORR will be designing the tower, which will eventually include 248 apartments, thousands of square feet of ground floor retail space and tens of thousands of square feet of office space.

Around half of the rental apartments will be studios, while the rest will come in one- and two-bedroom layouts. A majority of the apartments will have the advantage of private…

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9 W. Walton Condo Just Sold For a Whopping $17.4 Million

A condo at 9 W Walton in Chicago just sold for a whopping $17.4 million in an off-market sale, making it one of the most expensive properties to sell in the city this year. The only single-family property to sell for a higher price in 2022 has been a $20 million penthouse sold at Trump Tower Chicago.

As for the 9 W Walton condo, it sits on the 34th floor of the Gold Coast building and sold in March. Property records list both the buyer and seller as trusts.

The last time the condo sold was in 2018. At that time, a trust purchased the condo from the developer for $8.9 million, which was about half the recent sale price.

The building is home to celebrities and other big names in the Chicago area. A few years ago, a hedge fund billionaire purchased four…

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Should You Wait Out The Current Housing Market? The Pros and The Cons

The current housing market is on fire, but should you wait it out or jump into the mix? After all, at the end of 2021 the number of unsold homes on the market hit an all-time low nationwide. There are still more buyers than sellers out there, and that has homes going fast.  

There’s a lot of pressure on buyers with fewer homes to choose from and more competition. Of course, there are both pros and cons if you’re thinking about joining the red-hot housing market. Here are a few things to consider: 

Pros:

• Different markets

It could depend on where you’re looking at buying. There are lots of real estate submarkets, and some are hotter than others right now. They also change on a weekly or monthly basis. 

• Price increase gamble 

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Chicago Home Prices Continue Upward Trend

Chicago home prices continue to climb. According to recently released figures, single-family home values in the Chicago area rose more than 12-percent in January of this year compared to a year earlier.

That makes the ninth straight month of double-digit increases in home prices and the longest string in about 30 years. The data from Case-Shiller goes back to the late 1980s, and since that time there’s never been this long of a string of double-digit price increases.

Even in late 2013 and early 2014, prices only rose by the double digits for seven consecutive months. During the housing boom of the early 2000s, prices hovered around a nine percent increase for 13 months. Only once during that time did it top 10-percent.  

The news, of course, is…

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Housing Market Hits Level Not Seen in 15 years

The nation’s housing market just hit a level it hasn’t seen in about 15 years, and that’s not exactly a good thing for borrowers. This past December, the average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 3.11-percent. 

Recently, the average rate went up to 4.72-percent. That can make a real difference when it comes to monthly payments.

It could mean hundreds of extra dollars each month, or even more than an extra $100,000 over the course of a 30-year loan, depending on the size of the mortgage. The recent mortgage rate hike has some experts saying buyers are in a similar situation as they were in 2007. 

That’s the last time the mortgage-payment-to-income ratio topped 29-percent, but it appears we’re now seeing the same thing. According to recently…

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Another New Apartment Building May Be Coming to The West Loop

Hundreds of new apartments could be coming to the West Loop. Two local developers have proposed a new 36-story apartment building, which could mean 362 more apartments for the area. 

The site sits on South Green Street, close to the Jane Byrne Interchange. It’s currently home to low-rise buildings and a parking lot. 

If all goes through, the new apartment tower will be one of the tallest buildings in the neighborhood. The architect for the 404-foot building is locally based Goettsch Partners.

Plans call for the building to rise up from a three-story podium, which includes some parking spaces. One of the developers, Golub & Co, already has projects in the Loop, South Loop and Streeterville.

The other developer, GSP Development, has ties to Glen…

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How Some Million Dollar Home Buyers Are Getting Better Mortgage Rates

If you’re in the market for a new home, you may get a better rate for a more expensive home. According to newly released figures, the rate for a 30-year fixed jumbo mortgage last week averaged 4.48-percent.

That’s much less than the average 4.95-percent for a conventional loan. It’s also quite different from the early days of the pandemic when jumbo rates were about a half a percentage point higher than smaller mortgages.

Jumbo mortgages aren’t tied to secondary market as much as conventional loans. According to Bankrate.com data collected over the years, the recent gap between the two makes for the widest advantage high-end borrowers have seen since 1998. 

In most places, a jumbo loan is a mortgage for an amount over $647,200. It’s above…

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NFTs Enter the U.S. Real Estate Market

There’s a new entry into the US real estate market, and this one involves NFTs, or rather non-fungible tokens. Cryptocurrencies are nothing new, but they are starting to gain some attention when it comes to the nation’s real estate market.

In one recent example, A Florida home hit auction earlier this year with around 1,500 bidders on an online platform hosted by Propy. The Blockchain startup says it developed the legal framework and smart contracts to make tokenizing doable for real estate in the US.

The deal supposedly cuts down on closing time. The NFT owner is able to own the property through an LLC that actually houses the NFT.  

With traditional real estate sales, the process takes longer and there are some risks. Some say it’s a dated…

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