Chicago Real Estate News & Neighborhood Notes

Four pricey Gold Coast condos are now up for sale, following the recent announcement that a billionaire financial chief is headed to Florida. Ken Griffin, of Citadel, recently announced plans to move his firm to Miami.

Since that time, he’s put four of his condo holdings on the market, all of which are individually priced upwards of $10 million. To put that in perspective, just two Downtown Chicago condos sold for upwards of $10 million last year, and Griffin has four up for sale this year.

The real estate includes an entire unfinished floor at No 9 Walton. Griffin purchased all four top floors of the building in 2017 for $58.5 million but never finished the space. As of now, just the lower-level unit belonging to Griffin is for sale.

Listed for

The long-discussed, potential project at 151 N. Michigan is once again changing course, according to recent reports. What was previously going to be a 41-story commercial tower is now going to be a significantly smaller 3-story commercial building.

The existing building, which lies at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street, has been vacant sine 2008 when La Strada Ristorante closed. But given its small footprint, development challenges seem to make any future project a bit more complicated.

The owners, Park Ridge-based BJB Partners, also had designs on building a 184-unit apartment tower, with updated plans to add a hotel in 2105. But that plan inevitably dissolved.

The new plan, according to multiple reports, will allow the developer to

A new developer has plans to develop a condo building in the Gold Coast where another condo project failed to get off the ground. The latest plan calls for designing a 34-story condo tower on Maple Street where a four-story building now stands.

Previously, a different developer had hoped to construct a 22-story condo tower at the site. While the former plan only called for a dozen large condos, the new plan is for 54 condos and some parking spaces.

It’s expected the condos would likely range in size from around 1,300 to 6,000 square feet for a two-level penthouse unit. Plans also call for a drive-through motor court leading to an alley on the east side of the building, as well as a pedestrian lobby on the opposite side of the building.

Recently released

A Chicago-based development group is eyeing a 21-story apartment tower just one block east of the Magnificent Mile, a project that could be the first new construction apartments Streeterville has seen in five years.

According to Crain’s, Chicago-based Marek Development is partnering with Chicago-based architecture firm NORR to bring 248 apartments to the northeast corner of East Grand Avenue and North St. Clair Street, and the building would also include 41,000 square feet of office space, 8,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, and parking for 100 cars.

Believe it or not, downtown apartment construction has been on the upswing over the past year as rents and occupancies have recovered fro pandemic-induced declines.

Despite Streeterville being a

Construction is now underway on a new condo building in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood. Unlike many of the neighborhood’s other buildings, Embry features a modernized, Art Deco-style façade.

The 15-story building will eventually make room for 58 new condos. Buyers have the option of two-, three- and four-bedroom configurations at Embry. There are also some duplexes in the tower. Many of the units are priced upwards of $2 million. 

The new condos come with such extras as a home office, a den, a full-size laundry room and a large private terrace. Shared amenities include an indoor/outdoor fitness center, a putting green, and a yoga studio. Other planned amenities include an outdoor deck with a firepit and a residential lounge.

The new condo

The owner of a Streeterville tower with empty office space has a new plan to bring people to the building. It includes turning five vacant floors of existing office space into a 101-room hotel.

The proposal involves floors six through 10 of the Axis Apartments & Lofts building at 446 E Ontario Street. Plans call for remaking the space into rental units with a two-night minimum stay.

Unlike a traditional hotel room, the units available in this building would be more like short-term rentals, with one- to three-bedrooms. There could also be a landscaped open terrace for renters available on the building’s sixth floor.

Despite demand for hotel rooms being significantly down over the past two years due to the pandemic, those behind the project are betting on a

A plan to expand Google with more office space in Chicago’s Fulton Market District is pushing forward. According to published reports, the search giant wants to lease around 200,000 square feet of additional space in the area.

That amounts to about half of a new office building at 400 N Aberdeen Street. The recently completed building currently offers a total of 425,000 square feet of space.

If all goes through, the deal would turn Google into the building’s anchor tenant. It would also significantly help boost downtown’s office market, which has been impacted by an increase in remote workers since the pandemic first began.

For its part, Google has hired hundreds of people in the Chicago area since the pandemic started. The company is reportedly targeting

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

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

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