Golub, Alcion Take Loss on $130 Million Chicago Apartments

A California investor scooped up one of the Gold Coast’s marquee apartment towers, closing a nine-figure deal that underscores the strength of Chicago’s rental market and the painful price resets still rippling through the city’s investment landscape.

San Francisco-based Friedkin Property Group paid $130 million for the 26-story, 304-unit One East Delaware, according to Cook County records — one of downtown’s priciest multifamily trades of the year, yet still a steep markdown from the sellers’ basis, Crain’s reported.

The building at 1 East Delaware Place, was sold by a venture of Golub & Co. and Alcion Ventures, which bought it for $146 million in 2016 and later poured another $30 million into renovations. JLL’s Mark Stern, Kevin Girard and Zachary Kaufman brokered the transaction.

At roughly $428,000 per unit, the sale trails only the Fulbrix deal in Fulton Market and the Left Bank in the West Loop among 2025’s top multifamily trades. The 233,115-square-foot building sold for about $558 per square foot.

The building also offers 37,000-square-feet of retail space that is 87 percent leased.

But the pricing also highlights how far values have fallen for older downtown towers as large transactions are difficult to pencil amid high interest rates.

The Golub-Alcion venture refinanced the property in late 2021 with a $113.5 million loan that was scheduled to mature in November 2024. Whether the lenders provided an extension was unclear, but the clock was ticking.

It’s not the first Golub-related asset to take a hit. Chestnut Place, across the street from One East Delaware and recapitalized last year by another Golub venture, traded at roughly 20 percent below its 2017 price. That 280-unit building sold for $85.2 million, or about $304,000 per unit — another marker of the reset underway in the Gold Coast.

Golub publicly brushed off the broader market turbulence when it brought One East Delaware to market in May, calling it a “high-performing asset” in a prime neighborhood.

The fundamentals back that up: the 1989-built tower was 95 percent occupied at listing, with studio, one- and two-bedroom units averaging nearly $3,000 a month, or $3.90 per square foot, according to CoStar. With only one major downtown apartment building delivered this year, rents climbed more than 8 percent year over year in the third quarter, Integra data shows.

For Friedkin, the deal adds a rare downtown stake to a Chicago-area portfolio otherwise concentrated in the suburbs, including Naperville, Evanston, Elk Grove Village and Aurora.

— Eric Weilbacher