Ken Griffin has left the building.
The formerly Chicago-based billionaire on Tuesday sold his final two unfinished, full-floor condominiums in the building at 9 W. Walton Street on the Gold Coast for a combined total of $15.9 million. The sales bring to a close one of the stranger odysseys in high-end Chicago-area real estate that began in late 2017, when Griffin paid $58.75 million for four full-floor condos in the then-newly-built tower.
Records show that Griffin, who never finished any of the condos in the building at 9 W. Walton, sold the 7,085-square-foot unit on the 35th floor for $7.4 million and the 7,500-square-foot 36th-floor unit for $8.5 million. Public records do not yet identify the buyers, but listing information shows that each floor’s buyers were represented by different agents. That would argue for there having been two different buyers.
With Griffin having sold the top two floors in the building to Gov. JB Pritzker in November for $19 million, the full magnitude of Griffin’s losses at 9 W. Walton have now come into view. In total, Griffin sold the four units for a total of $34.9 million, meaning that he lost $23.85 million on the four sales.
Listing agent Nancy Tassone declined to comment to Elite Street on the sales.
Griffin originally wanted more for the unit on the 35th floor. He first had sought $14 million in 2022 for the 35th-floor condo, meaning he ultimately accepted little more than half of his desired amount. Meanwhile, he initially had asked $8.5 million in November for the 36th-floor unit, and that’s the amount for which he sold it.
Griffin’s $58.75 million purchase in 2017 was a package deal, with each of the four units selling for a separate amount. Records show that Griffin paid $12.5 million in 2017 for the 35th-floor unit and $12.13 million in 2017 for the 36th-floor unit. As a result, Griffin lost a total of $8.7 million on the two units he sold on Tuesday.
Griffin, who famously announced in 2022 that he would move his Citadel hedge fund firm and his own personal residence from Chicago to south Florida due to his perceptions about crime in Chicago, is not yet through with Chicago real estate. His six-bedroom, 9,250-square-foot full-floor unit on the 67th floor of the Park Tower — the building’s top level — remains on the market for $15.75 million.
And 9 W. Walton isn’t the only place where he’s seen losses on residential property. Griffin previously sold a full-floor condominium on the 66th floor for $11.2 million to billionaire retired filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, who long had owned the full-floor 65th-floor unit. Griffin paid $15 million for that 66th-floor unit, meaning he lost $3.8 million when he sold that unit to Lucas and Hobson.
Griffin, however, doesn’t only own real estate in south Florida, where he has made $670 million worth of home purchases and is building a 50,000-square-foot mansion. He also owns other trophy properties all over, including in Hawaii, Colorado, London and St. Tropez, France, and he owns four floors in a building on Central Park South in New York City, which he purchased in 2019 for $239.96 million — a record for the highest purchase price for a single home in the U.S.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
