CHICAGO—In the 1970s, downtown Chicago was just a place to work,and few people imagined that anyone would want to live there,especially in one of that era's office towers. But GlenStarProperties, LLC has just finished selling the last of the215 condominiums in its Park Monroe development at65 East Monroe, atop the 49-story 55 East Monroe Building, firstcompleted in 1972. The company began pre-selling the 50 units inthe project's phase 2 in 2013, and the relatively quick buysillustrate that the downtown condo market has recovered from therecession.

“It was a very hot market for condos when we began pre-sellingPhase 1 in 2007,” Rand Diamond, a principal atGlenStar, tells GlobeSt.com. Sales slowed, of course, once therecession hit, and even though the 165 units eventually sold, itwas not until 2013 that “the condo market got very hot again. Forthe last five years, the big thing has been apartments, especiallyin the West Loop, but condos are coming back.”

Perhaps the most important factor has been the return of lendersto the sector. In fact, GlenStar received a construction loan forphase 2 from Wells-Fargo, and Diamond says it wasthe first condo loan the bank had done locally in five years. Theincreasing confidence among the lenders “was absolutely thecatalyst for a lot of the new development.”