Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump said he expects his bankers to give him extra time to pay back a loan used to finance the 92-story Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago as demand slumps for condominiums in the third-largest U.S. city.

Trump, the New York-based developer and marketer of luxury real estate and a television host, said in an interview ``it's routine'' to get an extension. He said he's sold $600 million of the units in the hotel and condominium project. The hotel part of the tower has already opened and the entire building is scheduled to be completed next year.

Downtown condominium projects are being delayed and pulled as developers find it difficult to lure buyers and obtain loans in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper. The Chicago Spire, planned as the world's tallest residential building at 2,000 feet (610 meters), is holding off construction above ground, its backers said, because of volatile financial markets.

``The market in Chicago is very bad at this moment,'' Trump, 62, said in a telephone interview. ``The market in Chicago is extremely soft.''

Trump has until Nov. 1 to reach an agreement to extend the loan, originated and syndicated by Deutsche Bank AG, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Trump's 401 North Wabash Venture LLC, the owner of the Chicago project, took out a $640 million construction loan in 2005 from a unit of Deutsche Bank, documents filed with the Cook County Recorder of Deeds show.

Chicago Sales Slump

Trump's company also took out a short-term loan of $130 million from Fortress Credit Corp., a subsidiary of Fortress Investment Group LLC, the New-York based private equity and hedge fund manager.

A message left with Lilly Donohue, a spokeswoman for Fortress, was not immediately returned. Deutsche Bank spokesman John Gallagher in New York said the bank's exposure to the loan is less than $50 million and he declined further comment.

Contracts signed for homes in downtown Chicago in the first six months of the year plunged 72 percent, according to Appraisal Research Counselors, a Chicago-based real estate valuation firm. Home sales overall in the city in September fell 16 percent to 1,770 from a year earlier and the median price fell 11 percent to $267,750, the Illinois Association of Realtors said in a statement on Oct. 24.

No `Urgency' to Buy

``There's definitely a very long list of concerns on the part of buyers and no real urgency to buy right now,'' said Gail Lissner, a vice-president of Appraisal Research.

Compounding Trump's difficulties is that some apartment owners are already reselling their condominium units in Trump's tower, competing for buyers with the units Trump is selling, Lissner said.

Condominiums in the Trump building are priced from $580,000 to more than $9 million. When it opens, the Spire will supplant the 1,450-foot Sears Tower across town as the tallest U.S. building and change the skyline of Chicago.

The Spire, being developed by Dublin-based Shelbourne Development Ltd., would make Chicago home to North America's two tallest towers if it is completed. Local historians and architects have said that could restore some of the swagger the city had from 1974 to 1988, when the Sears Tower was the world's tallest.

Chicago's Skyscraper History

The Spire's penthouse, which was listed at $40 million, is being bought by billionaire Ty Warner, 64, the founder of Oak Brook, Illinois-based Ty Inc., the maker of Beanie Babies stuffed toys, according to Shelbourne.

Shelbourne said it has sold more than 30 percent of the apartments in the 1,194-unit building.

Besides the Sears Tower, Chicago is known in architecture circles for Louis Sullivan's Auditorium building on Michigan Avenue, the Frank Lloyd Wright lobby of the Rookery building on LaSalle Street, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The city's high winds and moist soil made Chicago an unlikely home for tall buildings until William LeBaron Jenney, who served as a bridge builder in the Union Army in the Civil War, adapted steel frame bridge-making techniques.

The 10-story Home Insurance Building he built in 1885 was the world's first skyscraper, according to the Chicago Historical Society. The building, at LaSalle and Monroe Streets, foreshadowed Chicago's era of industrial growth that Carl Sandburg alluded to in a 1916 poem when he called Chicago the ``city of the big shoulders.'' It was torn down in 1931.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Louis in Chicago at blouis1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 30, 2008 17:25 EDT