Mondial apartments sell at a large profit

Mondial, in River West, is an apartment project that we’ve followed in dozens of posts through many ups and downs over more than seven years. Our keen interest in the project traced to the fact that I’ve known the project’s architect / developer, Jack Berger, since we were developing adjacent projects on the 1800 block of Halsted in the late 1970s.

Yesterday Chicago Real Estate Daily reported that the 141-unit Mondial had been sold for approximately $56 million, resulting in a substantial gain for Waterton Associates, which had acquired the project for substantially less than that.

If you work through the math, you’ll learn that the purchase price was approximately $370 a square foot – a higher price than the units failed to sell at as condos, and as good an indicator as any as to why recently-acquired rental buildings will not be converted to condos. A condo converter would have to sell the units for at least $500 a square foot in order for a conversion to make financial sense, and that would appear to be unrealizable today or in the near future.

In the video, above, Jack Berger talks about Mondial from an architect’s perspective.

(Visited 355 times, 1 visits today)