Sterling Bay keeps expanding beyond Fulton Market, Downtown

Sterling Bay is buying a medical research building in Lincoln Park, further diversifying its holdings beyond its Fulton Market stronghold and Downtown trophy office properties.

The Chicago-based developer completed the purchase of Lurie Children’s Hospital’s Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at 2430 North Halsted Street, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sterling Bay will lease the five-story, 119,000-square-foot facility back to the hospital until it consolidates its research operations near the hospital’s main campus in Streeterville next year. Sterling Bay then plans to renovate the 23-year-old building for future medical tenants, according to the Tribune.

The hospital announced it wanted to sell the building in 2014, and later hired Cushman & Wakefield to market it.

The building is not far from the Lincoln Common development by McCaffery Interests and partner Hines Interests. That will bring a variety of uses to the former site of the Children’s Memorial Hospital, which changed its name to Lurie Children’s Hospital when it moved to Streeterville in 2012.

Sterling Bay is one of the developers leading the continued redevelopment of the Fulton Market neighborhood, where it recently signed Google to an additional 132,000 square feet after developing the tech giant’s Midwest headquarters nearby.

It also made a number of acquisitions of high-profile Downtown office buildings, spending some $1.5 billion in the last year on Prudential Plaza, the Groupon headquarters at 600 West Chicago Avenue and the office portion of the former John Hancock Center at 875 North Michigan Avenue.

And as it continues working to win community and aldermanic approval for its Lincoln Yards mega-development along the North Branch of the Chicago River, it also recently launched a $500 million funding round to finance more acquisitions. [Chicago Tribune] — John O’Brien