Medical products company lists 101-acre suburban Chicago office campus

Another sprawling suburban Chicago office complex is for sale, with its redevelopment potential being advertised.

Medical products giant Baxter International has hired JLL to market its 101-acre, 10-building campus at 1 Baxter Way in Deerfield while the company searches for new office space in the Chicago area, Crain’s reported earlier. No asking price is listed for the property, which totals 646,000 square feet of buildings developed in the 1970s.

Like other companies long headquartered in suburban Chicago, Baxter wants to modernize its workplace to keep employees interested in coming into offices after working from home during the pandemic. Many of the company’s employees have chosen hybrid work schedules consisting of some days in the office and some working from home, a spokesman for the company told Crain’s.

The move to sell the property marks the latest large swath of corporate offices in the Chicago suburbs to hit the market with loads of redevelopment potential. Last year, Allstate put its 232-acre headquarters in Northbrook on the market and made a $232 million deal to sell it to Nevada industrial developer Dermody Properties. That company plans to demolish the office buildings and build 3.2 million square feet of warehousing.

JLL is also emphasizing the redevelopment prospects of Baxter’s property. Industrial developers are increasingly on the hunt for land since rents in that sector have exploded in the Chicago area and across the nation.

Suburban Chicago offices, meanwhile, have been falling out of favor for years, and have been prevented from recovering by the pandemic.

Suburban office vacancies sit at a record-high of 26 percent with 25 million square feet of unleased space across the suburbs, according to the brokerage Cresa. The northwest and north suburban submarkets are leading the way with the most vacancy, with respective vacancy rates of 33 percent and 25 percent.

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