Centaur Capital Buys Waukegan Warehouses

Blackstone founder John Schreiber made a bet on the Chicagoland industrial market last week.

Schreiber’s firm, Centaur Capital Partners, bought two industrial properties in Waukegan for $46 million from Rosemont, Illinois-based VentureOne Real Estate, public records show.

Centaur bought the properties at 1585 South Lakeside Drive and 1909 South Waukegan Road for $16 million and $31 million, respectively.

The Lakeside Drive property is a 133,000-square-foot distribution center on a 6.7 acre lot leased by packaging company Bolke Miller. Less than a mile from the Lakeside Drive property, the Waukegan Road property is a 271,000-square-foot manufacturing building on a 12-acre lot leased by packaging manufacturer VP Packaging.

VentureOne bought the two industrial buildings in 2023 for $39 million, records show.

The company also recently offloaded a 32-building industrial portfolio to New York-based DRA Advisors for just over $200 million. VentureOne spent roughly $150 million over three years assembling the portfolio between 2022 and 2024.

Representatives of VentureOne and Centaur Capital Partners did not respond to requests for comment.

Schreiber’s real estate moves are watched closely by those familiar with his background as the co-founder of mega-investor Blackstone.

Late last year, Centaur made another industrial purchase in Niles. In a joint venture with Talos Capital, the firms purchased a 314,028‑square‑foot FedEx facility at 5959 West Howard Street for $72 million.

Talos Capital, based in Westchester, Illinois and led by Brian Townsend, previously served as Blackstone’s industrial investment arm beginning in 2017 and prior to the creation of Link Logistics in 2019.

The price was a decline from the $84.3 million purchase price seller Sedco Capital, a Saudi Arabia–based investment manager, paid in 2019.

Schreiber is also a fixture in Chicago’s philanthropy community as the founder of Schreiber Philanthropy and a donor to Loyola University Chicago. In 2022, Schreiber and his wife Kathy Schreiber donated $100 million to the university.

The industrial purchases come as the region’s market normalizes post-pandemic. When COVID-19 wrecked havoc on real estate and boosted demand for online retailers, industrial developers fueled a building boom that threatened to create a supply imbalance in the market.

But recent reports note that spec development is evening out and existing inventory is absorbing tenants.

As of the second quarter, there were 11.4 million square feet of industrial space under construction in the Chicago area, of which 50.5 percent was speculative, NAI Hiffman found.

Vacancy across the region improved by 10 basis points quarter-over-quarter to 5.9 percent, NAI Hiffman found. In the first quarter of 2020, before the full effects of the pandemic had been felt in Chicagoland, the region’s vacancy rate was just over 6 percent.