Ken Griffin gets haircut on Waldorf Astoria condo

Ken Griffin’s sale of his longtime Chicago home in the Waldorf Astoria building closed Friday for $10.2 million, an 11 percent discount from the asking price when it hit the market with a flurry of the billionaire’s other luxury condos in the city in July.

The five-bedroom, 7,400-square-foot unit on the 37th floor was listed in July and went under contract Sept. 26. The buyer is not yet identified in Cook County records.

Nancy Tassone with Jameson Sotheby’s Int’l Realty was the listing agent, and said she was unable to comment on the deal. Julie Harron of Jameson Sotheby’s was the buyer’s agent and didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Griffin was poised to take a loss on the home even if it had sold at its full listing price. He bought it in 2014 for $13.3 million.

It’s the first of four high-end Chicago condos to sell after Griffin put them on the market in the wake of his decision to move his family and company, the hedge fund and financial services firm Citadel, to Florida. He has already assembled a $1 billion real estate portfolio there, including the Sunshine State’s most expensive residential purchase in history at $170 million.

The other three are still active listings, according to Zillow.

Those include an 8,000-square-foot full-floor condominium on the 66th floor of the Park Tower at 800 North Michigan Avenue for $13.25 million; a 9,250-square-foot full-floor condominium on the Park Tower’s 67th and top floor for $15.75 million; and a 7,085-square-foot unfinished condominium on the 35th floor of the building at 9 West Walton Street for $14 million.

The Lincoln Park mansion that’s long been lived in by Griffin’s ex-wife, Anne Dias, also returned to the market this month for $9.5 million, a cut from a quiet $10 million sale recorded in Cook County records this summer.

This week’s deal wasn’t the first sale Griffin’s made for more than $10 million in the Waldorf building. In 2014, he paid $16 million for a full-floor unit on the building’s 46th floor, and the next year sold it to billionaire Jude Reyes, the co-chairman of beer and food distributor Reyes Holdings, for the same price.

Griffin still hasn’t listed his unfinished space on the top three floors in the building at 9 West Walton. He paid $58.75 million in four separate transactions for the 35th through 38th floors of the building in 2017. It’s unclear what his plans are for the space, but he never moved in or completed the units.

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