CHICAGO—Investors may have slowed down their purchases in Chicago's downtown office market, but attractive deals still crop up. Ascentris, a Denver-based real estate private equity firm, has just purchased on behalf of one of its public retirement system clients 120 North LaSalle, a 383,000 square-foot, 38-story tower in the Central Loop submarket. Although Ascentris currently focuses a lot of attention on suburban properties, this building presented just the kind of value-add opportunity it prefers.

The company looks for relatively new properties with good access to public transportation and high walkability scores, but that could also use some improvements, James Proffitt of Ascentris tells GlobeSt.com. And 120 North LaSalle, designed by Helmut Jahn and built in 1991, “fit all of these criteria, but it just happened to be located downtown.”

The building already has a good roster of tenants that occupy about 83% of the space, he adds. The company plans “to do a capital improvement program and bring the lease rate up to around 90%.” Since 2003, Ascentris has focused exclusively on value-add and opportunistic investments across all the major property types and geographic regions within the US, and after executing its business plan it typically looks to sell.