A 332-unit apartment building just off Michigan Avenue sold for $126.1M, marking the first major downtown Chicago apartment deal this year.

A venture of Intercontinental Real Estate and Magellan Development Group scooped up the 42-story tower at 73 E. Lake St. in late January, according to public records. The pair bought the building from a venture led by UBS and its developers, Tony Rossi and Tom Moran, and set a new benchmark for apartment pricing in early 2026.

Intercontinental and Magellan did not immediately return requests for comment.

The price point for the tower was about $380K per unit, according to The Real Deal. The sellers listed the building, completed in 2014, for sale in 2024, with a CBRE brokerage team led by John Jaeger, Justin Puppi and Jason Zyck.

Rossi told Crain's Chicago Business the development costs for the building totaled between $110M and $120M, meaning the sale resulted in a small gain for the developers.

“The market is not real deep. There’s not a lot of buyers in the market, not a lot of trades,” Rossi told the outlet.

He said the building's occupancy and rents have performed well. When the tower hit the market two years ago, it was about 93% occupied with an average rent of $3,054 per month, Crain's reported.

The city’s multifamily sector, while posting strong vacancy rates and rent growth, has only a trickle of new development underway, which could benefit new investors and landlords.

Chicago’s multifamily construction pipeline is one of the driest in the U.S., with this year’s deliveries expected to dip below 4,000 units, according to a Marcus & Millichap 2026 forecast. That mark would be the lowest since 2012.

Vacancy projections for the end of the year are at 3.8%, roughly 200 basis points below the area’s long-term average. Chicago multifamily rent is expected to increase 0.5%, with the average effective rent reaching $2,300 per month by year-end.

Inland Mortgage Capital President Art Rendak said at the end of January that a tight market could lead to more institutional investors coming back to the city as they go after the sector’s strong fundamentals.

“Institutional capital will come back,” Rendak said. “They're smart people. They see the metrics that the supply here is in equilibrium, or probably undersupplied. There's not a lot of multifamily growth here as far as new construction, and I would expect to see more institutional capital flowing into Chicago.”