Santefort Real Estate Group Buys Pleasant Prairie Apartments

The strength of the Chicago area’s multifamily market now extends to the Wisconsin border, too.

Westmont, Illinois-based Santefort Real Estate Group recently expanded into the market with its first two apartment complex purchases in the Badger State.

Santefort bought The Fountain Ridge and Cobblestone Creek Apartments in Pleasant Prairie Wisconsin near the Illinois border for a combined $100 million, or about $234,000 per unit. The purchase of the two properties, which total 426 units, was backed by a $66 million loan arranged by Berkadia, according to people familiar with the deal.

The recent deals in southeast Wisconsin highlight a growing demand from multifamily investors for properties in the Chicago metro area and the Midwest in general.

The Midwest region began seeing momentum around 2022 when formerly hot markets like Austin, Nashville and Phoenix began to cool off. As interest rates began to tick up, Sun Belt cities struggled with multifamily distress and an influx of development led to concerns of oversupply, weighing rents down.

On the other hand, effective rents in Chicago climbed 3.8 percent year-over-year to about $1,800, in the last quarter of 2025, according to MMG Real Estate Advisors. Nationally, average rent grew 0.6 percent to about $1,700 during the same time period, MMG found.

In southeast Wisconsin, investors benefit from proximity to both Chicago and Milwaukee, Santefort COO John Perkowski said, and it presents a “tremendous long-term upside.”

There’s enthusiasm for the area across asset classes in the property market.

On the single-family side, neighboring Kenosha, Wisconsin ranked as the third-hottest real estate market nationally last fall, a Realtor.com analysis found. The city, about 60 miles north of Chicago, was joined by six other Wisconsin markets and two in Illinois in the top 20, when ranked by days on the market and activity on the website’s listing page, a September report found.

The rankings reveal buyers are increasingly interested in low-cost markets outside major hubs like Chicago, where prices are rising and low inventory is squeezing availability.

And renters are branching out too. Apartments in Chicago’s suburbs have seen increased demand as rent in the city ticks up amid dwindling multifamily supply. Lenders have been more eager to fund new developments and acquisitions in the outer suburbs than the city because of the city’s volatile political and property tax environment.

This year, Chicago is on track to see the lowest number of new apartments completed since 2012, according to a recent report from Marcus & Millichap. Less than 4,000 new units will be completed by the end of 2026, the brokerage found. But the Lake County-Kenosha submarket in the far northern suburbs of Chicago is slated to receive the most new units in 2026, the brokerage found.
Santefort took note of that trend and bought a 181-unit apartment complex in Lombard, in the western suburbs where development remains more suppressed, for $46 million last year.