Investor Profits Big $111M Suburban Chicago Multifamily Sale

Suburban Chicago’s market for big apartment complexes is on a roll.

In the latest deal, San Francisco’s FPA Multifamily sold a 662-unit apartment building in Rolling Meadows at 4700 Arbor Drive for $111 million, 54 percent more than the $72 million it paid in 2017, Cook County property records show. The buyer is an entity that shares an address with Brooklyn-based investor Beitel Group.

The sale, which closed last month, valued each unit at more than $167,000 apiece, similar to the per-unit value implied by the $32.25 million deal for a 192-apartment complex in suburban Elk Grove earlier this year. Neither the buyer nor seller responded to requests for comment.

The Rolling Meadows deal followed the 80 percent profit that Chicago investor Rockwell Property made earlier this year on the $137 million sale of the 1,155-unit Glen Ellyn Crossing complex to Los Angeles-based Turner Impact Capital. That was a record for Chicago’s suburbs.

Multifamily assets in Chicago’s suburbs and the city have been attracting out-of-state buyers with high cap rates, a measure of rental income compared with the purchase price, relative to the rest of the nation, even as markets across the Sun Belt lure capital from Chicago investors looking to diversify and profit from population growth in places like Texas, Phoenix and Nashville.

FPA remains a big player in the Chicago multifamily market. Last year it made Chicago’s priciest multifamily acquisition, paying $175 million for McClurg Court at 333 Ontario Street in the city’s downtown. Its 2017 purchase of the Rolling Meadows complex it just sold was part of a buying spree of six properties in the area with more than 1,900 units, Crain’s reported at the time.