RPM Living Pays Greystar $99M for Fulton Market Tower

RPM Living paid Greystar $99 million, or roughly $444,000 a unit, for the 223-unit apartment tower at 166 North Aberdeen Street in Chicago’s Fulton Market neighborhood, according to The Real Deal. The 21-story building, known as One Six Six, is Austin-based RPM’s latest nine-figure Chicagoland buy and one of the clearer prints yet on what a recently delivered lease-up trades for in this cycle.

Why it matters

Greystar developed and completed the tower in 2023, refinanced it with a $62 million loan last year, then listed it in April through JLL at 95 percent leased before closing this sale. That sequence, build, stabilize, refinance, sell, is the merchant-build playbook every developer underwriting a lease-up today is running the same math on. A $444,000-per-unit exit on a three-year-old, nearly full building is the number to underwrite against, not the pro forma assumptions from when the project broke ground. For developers weighing whether to hold, refinance again, or sell into today’s buyer pool, this is a real data point from a comparable asset class and delivery vintage.

The numbers

The sale pencils to about $444,000 per unit on the 223-unit, 21-story tower. Greystar’s $62 million refinancing last year implies the building carried debt equal to roughly 63 percent of this sale price heading into the marketing process, a loan-to-value level that reads as confident but not aggressive for a stabilized, newly built asset. RPM’s purchase continues an active run in the market: the buyer closed a $102 million build-to-rent community in Orland Park in March and paid $103.5 million for Waterton’s Grand Central apartments in June, according to The Real Deal.

We reported in July that Greystar sold Access Culver City in Los Angeles for $704,000 a unit. Set against that trade, this Chicago exit at $444,000 a unit shows the same seller clearing sharply different bases depending on market and asset type within the same cycle, a spread of more than 35 percent that no single-story outlet connects.

What’s next

Watch whether other Fulton Market and downtown Chicago towers delivered in 2022 and 2023 test the market at a similar basis now that a comparable lease-up has traded. RPM’s pace, three nine-figure Chicagoland deals since March, suggests the buyer intends to keep bidding rather than pause after this purchase. For developers elsewhere sitting on newly stabilized national multifamily product, the more useful question is not what this building sold for but what loan-to-value a lender was willing to carry on it a year before the exit, since that is the number a lender will look at again on the next deal.