Various (Web) Voices Question Whether or Not 1000M Gets Built

In case you missed it, last week there was a ceremonial groundbreaking for the 74-story 1000M condo high rise planned for the block of 1000 S. Michigan.  The plans are beautiful and surely would add another gem to the South Loop's portion of the iconic Chicago skyline.

We posted about this two weeks ago and was surprised that this was moving forward.  It sounds like we're not the only ones who felt this way.  Others have been clearer about their head-scratching.  For instance Chicagobusiness.com (aka Crain's):

Will this Helmut Jahn tower get built?A ceremonial groundbreaking was set for today at 1000 S. Michigan Ave. for the 74-story condo tower the architect designed. The start of actual construction hasn't been announced. Crain's has some questions.

The body of the article makes some stark points about the price per square foot:

Typically, around the time of a groundbreaking, developers like to talk up their pre-sale figures. As an example: When ground was being broken for 95-story Vista Tower in Lakeshore East in 2016, the developers reported that about 80 condos, or 20 percent, were already under contract. These developers, Time Equities based in New York City and JK Equities based in the New York suburbs, “are not speaking about financing or pre-sales,” spokeswoman Marisa Monte said in an email to Crain’s last week.

That’s not to say there haven’t been sales at 1000M.

The developers have marked 97 units as being under contract to buyers, Crain’s found by sifting through the listings database maintained by Midwest Real Estate Data. If accurate, that’s about 23 percent of the planned 421 units.

Of those marked sold, 53, or more than half, are studios and one-bedrooms priced between $259,000 and $700,000. Early in 2019, the developers announced they had reconfigured several floors to create smaller “micro-units” priced in the lower $300,000s and quickly sold at least 20 of them.

The top-priced unit at 1000M marked sold is a 2,150-square-footer on the 57th floor whose asking price was $3.43 million. If it closes near that price, it will top the record price for the South Loop. In 2016, buyers paid $3.2 million for a 4,600-square-foot condo on the 23rd floor of 1201 S. Prairie Ave., looking over Grant Park from its south edge.

Among the yet unsold: seven condominiums priced between $4 million and $8.1 million. In the past two years, the average price of the more than 2,000 condos sold in the South Loop has been $330,000, according to Midwest Real Estate Data.

“Any time you’ve got a product that’s more expensive than what has historically sold in the area, you have to get creative in the marketing,” said Ryan Preuett, a Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty agent who was one of two representing the record-priced Prairie Avenue condo. The buyers there had been looking in neighborhoods north of the park.

“We got them to come south and they saw how much more they could get in the South Loop,” said Preuett. (At the time of that sale, he was working for a different brokerage.) North of the park, they’d been spending about $1,000 per square foot, he said, while south of the park they paid about $695 a foot.

The $4 million-and-up condos at 1000M range from $1,229 to $1,476 a foot. “You’re in uncharted waters,” said Preuett, who emphasized that he was not saying they can’t sell at that level.

A couple other real estate voices on the interwebs have provided more air to these questions.  The Chicago Architecture Bog had a posted titled "A South Loop Skyscraper Breaks Ground Without Breaking Ground" and Joe Zekas from YoChiago posted this from his Linkedin handle:

To be fair, a lot of the questions are stemming from the Crain's article we posted about above.  We would love to see this building get built as it would have a major impact on the neighborhood and would help the momentum around the South Loop's side of Grant Park continue.

But...we're still skeptical.