CHICAGO—In the 1970s, downtown Chicago was just a place to work, and few people imagined that anyone would want to live there, especially in one of that era's office towers. But GlenStar Properties, LLC has just finished selling the last of the 215 condominiums in its Park Monroe development at 65 East Monroe, atop the 49-story 55 East Monroe Building, first completed in 1972. The company began pre-selling the 50 units in the project's phase 2 in 2013, and the relatively quick buys illustrate that the downtown condo market has recovered from the recession.
“It was a very hot market for condos when we began pre-selling Phase 1 in 2007,” Rand Diamond, a principal at GlenStar, tells GlobeSt.com. Sales slowed, of course, once the recession hit, and even though the 165 units eventually sold, it was not until 2013 that “the condo market got very hot again. For the last five years, the big thing has been apartments, especially in the West Loop, but condos are coming back.”
Perhaps the most important factor has been the return of lenders to the sector. In fact, GlenStar received a construction loan for phase 2 from Wells-Fargo, and Diamond says it was the first condo loan the bank had done locally in five years. The increasing confidence among the lenders “was absolutely the catalyst for a lot of the new development.”
The Park Monroe condos occupy the top nine floors. The smallest is about 950-square-feet, but the top floor only has 12 units that range in size from 3,200-square-feet to 4,800-square-feet. In phase 2, “we found that there was a market for larger units,” Diamond says. Furthermore, “we were really the only project that was offering new construction in our submarket. People could select their own finishings and that was something they could not do elsewhere since most of the other available condos in the area were completed years ago,” but unsold due to the recession.
“We attracted quite a mixture of buyers,” Diamond says. “We have empty-nesters that have retired and use their condo as a primary residence. Our proximity to the Art Institute and Symphony Center were a big draw for them. We also have young professionals who walk to work and a lot of people who use their condo as a second home.”
And, as reported in GlobeSt.com yesterday, the influx of condo and apartment residents has given the East Loop a work/live atmosphere and made it more attractive to tech firms looking for alternatives to River North. “If you go out onto our street at 10 PM, even on Sunday, there are people everywhere, and that's a nice thing.”
“There is now a nice congregation of condo projects in the East Loop,” he adds, pointing to other significant developments such as the Heritage at Millennium Park, which sits just behind the Chicago Cultural Center at 130 N Garland Ct., and the 64-story 340 on the Park at 340 E. Randolph St. on the doorstep of Millennium Park. “It's now a neighborhood.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
