A Chicago real estate investment firm is looking for a developer willing to jump on the office-to-resi bandwagon.
Mon Ami Real Estate hired CBRE’s Dominic Soltero and Marcello Campanini to market a seven-story, 83,000-square-foot office building at 1033 West Van Buren Street, marketing materials show.
The West Loop brick-and-timber loft building was built in 1904, according to Loopnet, making it a candidate for a residential conversion project or a creative loft office development, a LinkedIn post from Soltero notes. It also has no lease restrictions in place, according to the listing. An asking price was not included.
When the pandemic upended Chicago’s office market, office-to-residential conversions became a hot topic among developers and local politicians alike. But financing the projects has been difficult because of rising material, labor and debt costs and because many office buildings have significantly different layouts than typical apartment buildings.
In response, the city of Chicago launched a tax incentive program to provide subsidies for conversions in the Loop. Over $900 million worth of projects have been funded by the program so far, totaling 1,700 planned units across 2 million square feet of space, according to the city of Chicago.
Still, office-to-residential conversions have had a shaky track record so far.
Chicago-based Mavrek Development is partnering with Acres Commercial Realty, a real estate investment trust, to convert the 24-story tower at 65 East Wacker Place into 200 apartments after another venture fumbled similar plans. Intersection Realty Group gave up the building to its lender through a deed-in-lieu foreclosure in 2024 after failing to get started on a proposal to convert it to 144 apartments.
Mavrek’s new proposal is moving ahead as planned after the group secured $90 million in financing in September.
Meanwhile, the office sector has been on a slow comeback since the pandemic, but showed signs of progress last year.
Tenants leased 10.3 million square feet of office space in downtown Chicago last year, compared to an all-time low of 5.5 million square feet leased in 2020 during the pandemic, historic data from Savills shows. The 10 million square feet threshold hadn’t been surpassed since 2019 until last year, according to a report from Savills at the end of 2025.