Lendlease gets $4.1M for penthouse in Cirrus condo tower

Lendlease has found another buyer for one of its penthouses near the top of its Cirrus tower, Chicago’s newest condo building in Lakeshore East, for $4.1 million.

Condo sales at the building have been picking up this year after a slower start, said listing agent Brad Brondyke of Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty. It’s the second-priciest purchase closed in the building so far.

The four-bedroom, five-bathroom, 3,600-square-foot home went for $1,128 per square foot. The unit on the 42nd floor of the 47-story building was listed for $4.5 million in March and went under contract for $4.1 million at the end of last month, according to public listing information.

The Cirrus was developed by the Australia-based worldwide construction company Lendlease — which earlier this year pulled out of the U.S. development market. The 350-condo building was co-developed with Chicago-based Magellan in a venture that used a $283 million loan to fund Cirrus’ construction along with the neighboring 37-story apartment building, the Cascade. Cirrus opened in the spring of 2022.

Sotheby’s took over listings for Cirrus early this year, after a team that included Magellan and Wolf Residential agents previously led sales. Brondyke said he thinks the downtown Chicago condo market is making its comeback. This year marked the first in recent memory without a major condo project under construction.

“Any of these newer buildings were slower pre-construction, post-COVID, but we’ve seen a huge uptick in traffic in the last six to nine months of people that want to be back downtown,” Brondyke said. “They’re no longer looking in the Florida vacation markets and they’re coming from the suburbs to be in the city for its affordability and quality of life.”

This is especially true in the Lakeshore East neighborhood, he said, adding that the Cirrus building’s proximity to the lake has been a draw for buyers. The buyer of the penthouse unit that sold most recently came from River North to be closer to the lakeshore, Brondyke said. The buyer’s identity was not disclosed and the deed of sale for the penthouse has yet to be made public.

“Buyers maybe in the last three to five years would have discounted the Lakeshore East or Streeterville neighborhoods and would have focused more on Gold Coast and River North,” he said. That seems to be changing.

Last year, the $4.5 million sale of a two-story penthouse unit marked the highest price for a Cirrus property at that time, The Real Deal reported. Lendlease snagged one of Cook County’s 10 biggest real estate loans last year with a $130 million condo inventory loan from JP Morgan Chase that the developer took out against 159 of the property’s unsold units, along with dozens of parking spaces on the property, public records show.

Cirrus holds 15 total penthouses across the 42nd to the 46th floors, with three units per floor featuring 10-foot ceiling heights, a foot more than units throughout the rest of the building. A 44th floor penthouse went on the market for $3.65 million in April, listed with Brondyke, according to public listing information.

The remaining available units at the building carry price tags ranging from $500,000 to $5 million, Brondyke said. He estimated that the average sale price at the building this year has been more than $1.5 million.

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