SoNo Sale in Chicago Closes
SoNo East, a new 22-story apartment tower with ground-floor retail at 840 West Blackhawk St. in Chicago, has traded hands. In 2011, Prudential Real Estate Investors agreed to purchase the property upon completion from Smithfield Properties, and now the deal has been done for an unspecified price.
By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor
Chicago—SoNo East, a new 22-story apartment tower with ground-floor retail at 840 West Blackhawk St. in Chicago, has traded hands. In 2011, Prudential Real Estate Investors (PREI) agreed to purchase the property upon completion from Smithfield Properties, and now the deal has been done for an unspecified price.
SoNo East includes 324 units, 3,990 square feet of retail and a 204-stall parking garage. Its units feature nine-foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. Community amenities include a fitness center, a stainless steel swimming pool, hot tub, sundeck, billiards room and great room.
The property is the second of two residential structures built by Smithfield in the area. The first, SoNo West, broke ground before the recession hit, and was completed in 2009, but work on SoNo East had to wait for the worst of the economic crisis to pass and didn’t start construction until 2011.
The property is in the Clybourn Avenue corridor, where no high-rise residential properties have been built since the late 1980s. The area is largely characterized by low-rise retail, and is near Chicago’s new Whole Foods flagship store.
HFF marketed the property on behalf of Smithfield, whose other recent projects include 30 West Oak and Joffrey Tower. The sales team on the deal was HFF director Daniel Kaufman, executive managing director Matthew Lawton and managing director Sean Fogarty.  As of the third quarter of 2012, buyer PREI managed about $51.2 billion in real estate assets on behalf of more than 490 clients worldwide.
