Ogden, Utah-Based Highland Partners Makes Its Largest Acquisition Yet with $119 Million Purchase of a Chicago Apartment Tower

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

✅ Ogden, Utah-based Highland Partners has acquired the 298-unit Exhibit on Superior apartment tower in downtown Chicago for $119 million, marking the largest acquisition in the firm’s history.

✅ The purchase price equates to approximately $399,000 per apartment and gives Highland a 34-story luxury residential property in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.

✅ The transaction reflects the fairly rapid growth of a Utah real estate investment platform that says its portfolio now exceeds $700 million across more than 90 multifamily properties in the Midwest and Intermountain regions.

✅ This latest transaction pushes Highland to valuation growth of over 6X for its Real Estate Assets Under Management (R.E. AUM) in under 48 months.

3 August 2026 — OGDEN, Utah — An Ogden-based real estate investment firm has completed the largest acquisition in its history, paying $119 million for a 298-unit luxury apartment tower in downtown Chicago.

Highland Real Estate Partners acquired the 34-story Exhibit on Superior at 165 W. Superior Street in Chicago’s River North neighborhood from Chicago-based Magellan Development Group.

The transaction, as reported by The Real Deal, CoStar News and Crain’s Chicago Business, values the property at approximately $399,000 per apartment.

For Utah, this news reveals the emergence of an Ogden-based private real estate investment platform that, since its 2020 founding, has grown from an operator of smaller multifamily properties primarily in Utah into a buyer capable of completing institutional-scale acquisitions in one of the nation’s largest apartment markets.

Highland’s Largest Deal Yet

Exhibit on Superior is Highland Partners' largest acquisition in its history, both by transaction value and apartment count.

Completed in 2017, the property includes

🔹 298 apartments,

🔹 109 indoor parking places,

🔹 ~14,500 square feet of ground-floor retail space, and

🔹 Roughly 225,000 square feet of rentable space.

According to The Real Deal, Highland's President, Ben Frazer, said the property was acquired for a price below what it would cost to replace the building today.

In other words, Highland Partners appears to have placed a bet that acquiring a relatively new, stabilized apartment tower for less than the estimated cost of constructing a comparable property will create a favorable long-term investment return.

According to media reports, Highland acquired the complex directly from its developer, a property

• With tenants,
• Operating history, and
• Immediate rental revenue in Chicago’s River North submarket.

The People Behind Highland Partners

Highland Partners was co-founded close to five-and-a-half years ago by Ben Frazer and Dylan Grigg.

Frazer serves as Highland's Investment Partner and leads the firm’s

• Capital formation,
• Acquisition sourcing,
• Underwriting, and
• Transaction execution

from New York City.

Before co-founding Highland in 2020, he spent six years with Singapore-based Temasek Holdings and previously worked in mergers and acquisitions at BofA Merrill Lynch.

According to Highland’s leadership biography for Frazer, he has led the acquisition of more than 55 individual multifamily properties across market-rate, affordable, and student housing.

Grigg serves as Highland's Operating Partner and oversees

• Acquisition due diligence,
• Portfolio operations,
• Asset management, and
• Property management.

According to Highland’s leadership page, Grigg helped establish the company’s property and asset-management teams across its targeted markets after previously acquiring, financing, renovating, leasing and managing real estate investments independently.

Together, Frazer and Grigg have built Highland Partners as a vertically integrated investment and operating platform, with one side of the partnership focused primarily on raising and deploying capital, and the other concentrated on property-level execution.

From Small Multifamily Properties to the Purchase of a $119 Million Apartment Tower

To be honest, Highland's growth has occurred relatively quickly.

In September 2022, the firm announced its first discretionary investment fund, Highland Multifamily Opportunities, with $44 million raised, surpassing its original $35 million target by nearly one-third.

At the time, Highland said the fund closing increased its equity capital under management to $65 million, with

• Nine acquisitions completed by then,
• For a combined total of 211 apartments (aka, doors) in the Chicago and Salt Lake City markets (at the time),
• Properties valued at ~$110 million in real estate assets under management (AUM).

Roughly two years later, Highland closed its second fund, Highland SMF Opportunities II, securing $18 million in limited-partner commitments during its first closing in October 2024.

Today, the firm has over $700 million in R.E. AUM across 90 properties in Utah, Illinois, and Arizona.

The company’s website says it manages more than 3,000 apartment units, including approximately 2,000 units in Greater Salt Lake City, and has operated in Salt Lake City and Ogden since 2019.

Those figures make the Chicago acquisition more than a standalone property purchase.

They illustrate the progression of an investment manager that reported approximately $110 million in real estate under management less than four years ago and now claims a portfolio valued at more than $700 million.

Yes, that's a jump in over 6X Real Estate AUM in under 48 months.

Based upon public disclosures, the $119 million purchase price of Exhibit on Superior appears to be Highland's largest acquisition to date.

Highland's equity investors participating in this and other acquisitions have not been disclosed, something not unusual in this and other fundraising circles.

But the firm has said more broadly that it manages real estate investments on behalf of individual investors, family offices and institutional investors.

Highland has also not disclosed whether Exhibit on Superior was acquired through

🔺 One of its existing discretionary funds,

🔺 A separate investment partnership, or

🔺 A property-specific acquisition vehicle.

As a result, it would be inappropriate to describe the transaction as having been funded specifically by Utah investors, Utah family offices, or any particular institutional capital provider.

What can be said, however, is that a previously little-known Ogden-based real estate investor/administrator has assembled and executed a $119 million acquisition, a transaction that represents a significant step beyond the smaller multifamily properties where Highland has initially built its investment platform.

Nicely done.

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