Fulton Market building on pandemic leasing streak lands $26M loan

Surviving and thriving during the pandemic by signing a series of leases even as downtown offices emptied earned an extra $26 million loan for a Tishman Speyer-owned property in Fulton Market.

The 13-story, 270,000 square foot building at 320 North Sangamon landed the financing from Wells Fargo, just two years after scoring an $81 million construction loan for the project co-developed by Tishman and Mark Goodman and Associates and built on spec.

It’s been one of Chicago’s most successful buildings amid the pandemic, with 50,000 square foot leases taken by biotech startup Hazel Technologies and restaurant technology company Tock, plus a 36,000-square-foot lease to real estate tech company VTS.

The project was originally geared to be strictly a traditional office building, but Hazel’s interest drove it to be modified to accommodate a research-based lab use in some spaces, a more common trajectory for new development in Chicago as the city tries to expand its stock of life sciences real estate and office demand remains diminished.

Tishman bought the development site at 320 North Sangamon Street, formerly home to a shuttered AmeriGas propane fueling and tank exchange station, for $15.8 million in December 2018.

Fulton Market was the city’s only neighborhood where Class A office availability dropped last year, to 23.1 percent, as the rest of the downtown office market suffered from the pandemic. While new development in Fulton Market continues to lease up, the central business district as a whole set a new record vacancy level last quarter as new projects in the Loop opened with big holes still to fill.

Strong demand in Fulton Market pushed up the average sale price per square foot to $678 last year, compared with the central business district’s $431.