A venture of Blackstone, which is finishing its $500-million-plus renovation of Chicago’s Willis Tower, is looking to sell a smaller, 11-story office building near O’Hare International Airport.
The listing for the Pointe O’Hare office building at 9550 West Higgins Road in Rosemont doesn’t have an asking price, according to Crain’s, which cited sources close to the property who said it could fetch bids as high as almost $40 million.
Some 3 million square feet of office tenants left the suburbs since the beginning of the pandemic, leading to a record 27 percent vacancy, according to JLL. The Point O’Hare building is below the average, with 34 percent vacancy.
Blackstone acquired the property as part of a $3.3 billion portfolio acquisition from GE Capital Real Estate in 2015. Cushman & Wakefield, which was hired to sell the property, said Blackstone invested $8.5 million in the building over the past seven years, including building move-in ready offices, updating the fitness and conference centers and renovating the 988-space parking garage.
Current tenants of the building include credit card-processing company TransNational Payments and an arm of the Air Line Pilots Association that represents United Airlines pilots. More than 60 percent of the building’s 18 tenants are from the financial, insurance or real estate industries.
While Blackstone is trying to unload one suburban office property, one of its subsidiaries — New York-based Link Logistics Real Estate — paid almost $150 million for industrial and office buildings in Waukegan and Zion in the biggest Chicago-area industrial property sale of 2022.
In the southern suburb of La Grange, another Blackstone subsidiary, Blackstone Real Estate Advisors, sold a 282,000-square-foot industrial property for $57.5 million last October. The industrial property at 9500 West Sergo Drive is occupied by FedEx Ground.
Blackstone is scheduled to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Willis Tower this week to showcase the more-than $500 million revamp of the city’s tallest building. Blackstone bought the tower for $1.3 billion in 2015.
Read more
[CCB] — Victoria Pruitt