Allstate Corp., the insurance behemoth, is selling the suburban Chicago headquarters it’s occupied since 1967 as more employees work from home.
“Allstate’s employees have more choice about where they work and many are choosing to work from home,” Allstate spokeswoman Tammy Kotula told the Chicago Business Journal. The firm plans to “keep a significant presence in the Chicago area,” the paper quoted her as saying.
According to the Chicago Tribune, 95 percent of Allstate’s employees have been working from home since the onset of the pandemic.
The office complex, on a 186-acre lot at 2775 Sanders Road in Northbrook, totals 1.9 million square feet, spread across several buildings. Allstate, which employs about 8,000 people in Illinois, hasn’t provided details about when it will be sold or how many workers will be affected.
The news of Allstate’s sale came as PricewaterhouseCoopers said that it will let 40,000 employees permanently work remotely from anywhere in the continental U.S. Employees will be required to come into the office up to three times a month for in-person meetings. The company expects 30 to 35 percent of employees will take up the offer.
As of Sept. 22, more than a third of office workers in the top 10 U.S. markets were physically back to work, according to Kastle Systems, which aggregates data from its swipe-card access systems. A report from by Cushman & Wakefield says the return-to-office trend around the globe will start to pick up in the first quarter of 2022.
Allstate’s decision comes on the heels of another potential move by a Chicago-area institution after half a century. The Chicago Bears of the National Football League, are exploring the possibility of building a new stadium on the site of a former race track in Arlington Heights.
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