Developer Mike Reschke and the James R. Thompson Center at 100 West Randolph Street (ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0/via Wikimedia Commons)
Google is planning a Chicago expansion of its offices, which may include a purchase of the Thompson Center, although the property’s developer denies reports the tech giant is in talks to buy the 1.2 million-square-foot building.
Mike Reschke, a veteran Chicago developer, dismissed a CoStar report that Google could emerge as the buyer of the 37-year-old building that formerly hosted state offices. Reschke said in December that he’ll buy the building for $70 million, a bid that saved it from demolition, put $280 million into renovations and then sell a third back to the state for more than $140 million.
“Chicago continues to be an important and growing hub for Google here in the Midwest,” Google said in a statement, without mentioning Thompson Center. “As Google grows in Chicago, we’ll continue to explore opportunities to ensure our physical space meets the needs of local Googlers.”
It already hosts almost 2,000 employees in Fulton Market, an area of the West Loop the firm moved into almost a decade ago, and has been credited with attracting a slew of other office tenants to the former meatpacking district.
Reschke told The Real Deal that Google is welcome to lease the property once it’s upgraded, and that he has been in talks with other tech firms for leases of up to 300,000 square feet. The notion that Google would purchase the building is “not true,” he wrote in an email, calling it “just some wild rumor.”
“We are talking to several large tenant prospects, of course on a confidential basis, and they all expect that the building is still available to lease,” Reschke said.
If Google or another high-profile tech company does take space in the conical, spaceship-shaped building at the corner of LaSalle and Randolph streets, it would be a much-needed lift for the Loop. The central business district faces record office vacancies after the pandemic muted demand for downtown office space.
Google also reportedly eyed a move for the former BMO Harris Bank property, a two-tower complex along Monroe Street between Clark and LaSalle streets that the financial institution and a law firm exited to move into the new BMO Tower on Canal Street. Their move left 900,000 square feet unclaimed and the property on the edge of distress.
Reschke is in talks to close this summer on a $191 million loan on that property at a discount, a deal that would let him to assume its ownership and renovate the tower facing LaSalle as offices and convert the Clark Street portion into as many as 280 apartments above several floors of offices.
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