Sale Of Evanston Apartment Building Is Biggest In North Suburbs For 2 Years

EVANSTON, IL — The sale of an Evanston apartment building is the most expensive purchase of a multi-unit development in the north suburbs since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

1717 Evanston, the 175-unit building at the corner of Ridge Avenue and Clark Street, was built in 2013. It currently has average rents of about $3,100 and just 3 percent vacancy, according to the seller's broker.

With 25 percent rent increases for apartments traded out in June and July, it is one of the city's most expensive apartment buildings.

Last month, Ivesco Real Estate, an Atlanta-based real estate investment manager, sold the building to CBRE investment management for $71.25 million, according to a deed recorded by the Cook County Clerk's Office Wednesday.

Kevin Girard, a senior director at Jones Lang Lasalle, was part of the team that represented Ivesco.

“This was a fantastic opportunity to work with two very important institutional clients on a deal in a dynamic location,” Girard said in a statement. “Evanston as a market has experienced extraordinary rent growth due to outsized demand and unique qualities with urban/suburban amenities, proximity to Northwestern University, Lake Michigan and both Metra and CTA train lines.”

The property's sale price is just over $1 million more than Invesco spent to buy the property more than eight years ago. Crain's Chicago Business, which first reported the sale, suggested a possible reason for the purchase price was increasing property taxes for commercial real estate landlords. Its annual property tax bill is more than 50 percent steeper than it was in 2015.

Following the departure of a former Democratic Party boss from the Cook County Assessor's Office in 2018, and a subsequent effort by his successor to shift some of the county's property tax burden from less wealthy homeowners to landlords of commercial properties, the Evanston apartment building's tax rate currently stands at $880,000.

The last apartment building sale to exceed the price of the Ridge Avenue building was the offloading of 260 apartments at Mellody Farms in Vernon Hills in late December 2019 less than a year after it opened, according to Crain's.

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