List Price: $2.5 million
Sale Price: $2.5 million
The Property: A 40th-floor penthouse at the 600 North Fairbanks condo tower has sold, but nobody’s moving. The sellers had rented out the condo, with a lease that expires in April 2012, and they insisted that any new owner honor that lease. The buyers, who live in Hinsdale “are OK with not moving in for a while,” says their agent, @Properties’ Annika Valdisseri. “They just wanted this beautiful space for their city place. They can wait to use it.”
The price is the highest paid for a condo in the building, says Jennifer Owen, the sales agent for Schatz Development, which built the tower.
The condo is one of three on the top floor of the tower, which was designed by the architect Helmut Jahn, his only entry in Chicago’s condo-building boom of the last decade. (A fourth condo also occupies part of the 40th floor; it is a duplex whose main space is on the 39th floor.) At just under 3,000 square feet, the newly sold condo is the second-largest unit in the building. “It’s considered the best [condo], being that it’s got lake views and 13-foot ceilings and a large balcony off the living room with south and east exposures,” Owen says. There is a second, northeast-facing terrace off the master bedroom. The condo is configured as a two-bedroom unit.
Valdiserri says that her clients had looked at the Trump building and 600 North Lake Shore Drive. “They love modern,” she says. Initially, there was nothing big enough available in 600 North Fairbanks, but Owen knew the owners of this penthouse had in the past tried to sell it, before opting to rent it out, so she inquired. The sellers, identified by the Cook County Recorder of Deeds as Bruce Gershenzon and Linda Schwartz, agreed so long as the buyers would keep the lease intact, she says. “They were thrilled to get the [amount] they got for it, but it was bittersweet,” she says. “They love this building.” She says they had planned to move into the condo in a few years. Now, somebody else will.
The sale closed December 31st. The buyers are not yet identified in public records, and neither Owen nor Valdiserri would name them.
Price Points: According to the county recorder, Gershenzon and Schwartz paid $2.075 million for the condo in June 2008. Owen says the condo was first rented out in early 2009, at $11,000 a month. Those tenants left in less than a year, and the current tenants moved in in December 2009, at $9,600 a month. This condo captured the building’s highest per-square-foot resale price, about $835 a foot, compared to what Owen says was the previous high, approximately $750 per foot for the duplex that shares part of the 40th floor.
Listing Agent: Jennifer Owen at Schatz Realty; 312-944-6207, ext. 223, or jowen@schatzdevelopment.com