New Eastside
New Eastside is framed by three of the most valuable pieces of Chicago real estate that aren't for sale: Millennium Park to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, and the Chicago River to the north. The neighborhood was largely built from scratch over the past 25 years, and the intentionality shows — in the building quality, in the consistency of demand, and in a price-per-square-foot that leads the downtown market. This is not a neighborhood people stumble into. They research it, compare it, and choose it deliberately. That buyer profile shapes everything about how the market here behaves, including what it looks like when it's time to sell.
Data current through Q3 2026 — updated quarterlyWhat this neighborhood is made of
New Eastside is almost entirely highrise: 12 of its 14 tracked complexes are towers, and the other 2 are townhome communities. Because so much of the neighborhood sits in a few large towers, individual buildings shape its numbers more than elsewhere: Outer Drive East (400 E Randolph), with roughly 1,000 units, weighs heavily on the figures for smaller homes, while St. Regis Chicago and Cirrus Condominiums set the top of the range and Aqua, Harbor Point, and Park Millennium fill in the middle.
Over the past two years, 629 homes sold here. Two-bedrooms make up 37% of sales and one-bedrooms 34%, while three-bedrooms account for 23%, well above downtown's overall 16%. Studios (4%) and four-bedroom-plus homes (under 3%) are a small slice. That three-bedroom share is one of the neighborhood's defining features: for buyers looking at larger homes in full-service towers, New Eastside offers more recent sales to compare against than most of downtown.
What you're writing a check for every month
| Unit size | New Eastside | Downtown | ↑/↓ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | $2,207 | $1,940 | ↑ $267 |
| 1BR | $3,330 | $2,860 | ↑ $470 |
| 2BR | $6,038 | $4,535 | ↑ $1,503 |
| 3BR | $10,860 | $8,793 | ↑ $2,067 |
| 4BR+ | $24,084 | $13,369 | ↑ $10,715 |
New Eastside, with its newer Lakeshore East buildings, costs more to own than the downtown-wide figure at every size, and the gap grows with the home. A one-bedroom runs about $3,330 a month, $470 above, and a two-bedroom about $6,038, roughly $1,500 above. Three-bedrooms cost about $10,860, and four-bedroom-plus homes about $24,084, nearly double the downtown-wide figure. Buyers are paying for full-service towers, some of them high profile, between the lake and Millennium Park.
The two-bedroom figure rose about $1,329 a month over the past year, far more than higher mortgage interest rates alone explain. The two-bedroom median price jumped mainly because more sales came from Cirrus and fewer from Park Millennium; in the same buildings, two-bedroom values rose about 5%. Other sizes rose more modestly, about $375 for one-bedrooms and $328 for three-bedrooms, mostly from the rate (7.60%, up from 6.36% the prior period). Same-building assessments rose about 6%, the most downtown-wide.
What's selling and how New Eastside compares
| Unit size | #Sold | Share of Downtown |
|---|---|---|
| Studio | 24 | 6% |
| 1BR | 215 | 7% |
| 2BR | 232 | 7% |
| 3BR | 142 | 10% |
| 4BR+ | 16 | 7% |
| All units | 629 | 7% |
New Eastside accounted for 629 of the 8,631 sales across all of downtown over the past two years, 7.3% of the total, up from 7.1% at the last update. Its 142 three-bedroom sales are about one in ten downtown-wide. Sales closed from July through September rose about 21% from the same months in 2025, the largest increase in all of downtown, and Cirrus drove most of it, going from 14 sales to 25. St. Regis Chicago held about steady, at six sales versus seven.
Sellers gained leverage. Over the past year, 41% of homes here sold at or above asking, up from 33% the prior period. For sellers, well-priced listings are drawing stronger offers than they did. For buyers, most sales still close below asking, so there's room to negotiate, though less of it than before. Higher mortgage interest rates had not changed that picture by the end of September, since most of these deals were agreed before rates climbed.
What's happening with values here
New Eastside's price per square foot is about $519, roughly 34% above the $386 downtown-wide median and the highest of any neighborhood. Price-per-square-foot growth was 13.7% over the past year, but in the same buildings it was about 6%: still solid, just less dramatic. The rest came from more sales in the neighborhood's pricier towers, Cirrus chief among them, which lifts the figure without the same homes becoming worth that much more.
Median Sale Price by unit size
| Unit size | Median Sale Price | vs. Downtown | Price Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | $235,000 | ↑ 18% | ↑ 0.9% |
| 1BR | $370,000 | ↑ 21% | ↑ 6.8% |
| 2BR | $702,000 | ↑ 41% | ↑ 26.9% |
| 3BR | $1,327,000 | ↑ 34% | ↓ 8.6% |
| 4BR+ | $2,995,000 | ↑ 93% | — |
Two-bedrooms jumped 26.9% to $702,000, but in the same buildings, two-bedroom values rose about 5%; the rest reflects more sales at Cirrus and fewer at Park Millennium. One-bedrooms rose 6.8% to $370,000, and studios held near $235,000. Three-bedrooms fell 8.6% to $1,327,000, but not because values dropped: more sales came from Cirrus and fewer from St. Regis Chicago, and the homes that sold were smaller. Four-bedroom-plus sold at a $2,995,000 median, with too few prior sales to compare.
What this data can't tell you
Everything above is aggregate data, and aggregate data has a ceiling. It can tell you where New Eastside sits relative to the rest of downtown, how its pricing has moved, what carrying costs look like across the building stock. It cannot tell you whether a specific building is well-governed, whether its reserves are adequate, whether its amenity spend is efficient, or whether a particular floor plan holds value the way the building's median suggests it should.
Those questions don't resolve at the neighborhood level. They resolve at the building level — and in some cases, only in conversation.