Photo by Magellan Development Group
A two-story condo listed for $18.5 million at the Vista Tower is under contract to a buyer, according to the tower's developer.
The condo won't be delivered, and the sale won't close, until construction on the undulating 101-story tower designed by architect Jeanne Gang and her firm Studio Gang is complete, scheduled for fall 2020. But if the sale were to close today at that price, it would be the fifth-highest sale price ever paid for a Chicago-area home.
The contract is for a 10,640-square-foot condo that will occupy the building's entire 71st and 72nd floors and will have an 8,000-square-foot outdoor terrace, according to information supplied by Magellan Development Group. The final sale price will not be known until it closes.
The space does not yet exist, as construction has reached only the 62nd floor, according to Magellan. It was not marketed as a two-story unit but as separate one-stories that the buyers wanted combined into one home, according to Lelia Zammatta, Magellan's senior vice president of sales.
Zammatta declined to identify the buyers.
The record local home price remains at $58.75 million, which Ken Griffin, head of the Citadel financial empire, paid in late 2017 for four floors at the top of No. 9 Walton. A Winnetka home traded bet members of the Crown family in 2015 for $25 million and was recorded in property records as a conventional sale.
The third-highest price is $19.5 million, which Groupon CEO Eric Lefkofsky paid for a Glencoe estate in 2014, and fourth is the $18.75 million sale of a Park Tower condo in 2015 to a firm with ties to "Star Wars" creator George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, head of Ariel Investments in Chicago.
At the moment, the condo combo is the highest-priced home in Vista Tower. The top residential unit, on floors 91 and 92, is priced at $17.4 million, according to Jim Losik, Magellan's marketing director. At about 6,800 square feet, it's smaller than the 71st/72nd-floor combo.
If other buyers combine floors, their purchase prices might eclipse the $18.5 million unit, Zammatta said. From the 71st floor to the top, all condos are full floors. With the two new contracts, those upper-floor units are half sold, Losik said.
Overall, the building has 396 units, with about 40 percent sold and 222 still for sale, according to Losik.
On July 16, the firm marked the listing for the 71/72 condo "pending" and did the same with the 5,600-square-foot unit that will occupy the building's entire 74th floor. That unit was priced at almost $8.36 million.
The unit priced at $18.5 million unit is the highest-priced in the building to land a contract so far. In 2016, Magellan marked units on the 75th and 87th floors, each priced at about $10.2 million, with pending contracts.
Including these newest contracts, the developers have marked at least 13 units with prices of $7 million or more "pending," according to Midwest Real Estate Data.
Source Crain's Chicago Business
