A 332-unit apartment tower just off North Michigan Avenue has sold for about $126 million, the city's largest sale of early 2026 following a busy year for multifamily transactions in downtown Chicago.
The 42-story tower at 73 E. Lake St. has been sold to a venture of Boston-based Intercontinental Real Estate and Chicago-based Magellan Development Group. The sellers were local developer M&R Development and UBS, its Swiss equity partner and lender on the project.
The price in the deal, completed in late January, was $126.1 million, according to online property records. Intercontinental and Magellan pulled off the first high-profile deal in downtown Chicago of the new year after a burst in high-rise sales in 2025.
In all, investors spent about $5.3 billion combined acquiring Chicago-area multifamily properties last year, up from $4 billion each of the past two years, according to CoStar data.
The Lake Street tower was part of a wave of thousands of downtown units flooding the for-sale market last summer and fall, with sellers testing the market after years of sluggish sales because of factors such as higher borrowing costs.
Chicago landlords have benefitted from rent growth that has outpaced most of the country. But the city also has been held back by factors such as some investors’ worries about property taxes and crime, according to Tony Rossi, chairman of M&R.
Rossi said M&R and UBS made a modest profit on a project that took about $110 million to build. The project was completed in 2014, and the owners previously explored a sale before trying again starting last summer.
The largest deals last year were a nearly $175 million sale of the 398-unit North Water Apartments property in Streeterville and a $170 million deal for the 375-unit Fulbrix tower in Fulton Market.
Magellan was a seller on another large deal not far from the Lake Street tower.
Magellan and Sterling Bay sold the multifamily and retail portions of the 47-story tower that they developed at 300 N. Michigan Ave. for $122 million. That sale did not include the 28-room hotel within the tower.
The sale of the tower at 73 E. Lake was previously reported by the Real Deal Chicago.
UBS and Intercontinental did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CoStar News. Magellan declined to comment.
Rossi said his firm wanted to remain in the deal by buying the tower with a new investment partner, Houston-based Dinerstein Cos. Dinerstein, M&R and Bucksbaum Properties previously teamed up to buy UBS out of another Chicago project, the Addison & Clark apartment and retail complex across the street from Wrigley Field, in 2023.
“We did not want to sell, but UBS made an institutional decision to sell,” Rossi said of the Lake Street deal. “We put in a bid, we just didn’t get there.”
For the record
The sellers were represented by CBRE brokers John Jaeger, Justin Puppi and Jason Zyck.