MAT Limited buying, redeveloping Damen Silos for $6.5M

Illinois officials picked a buyer who will transform Damen Silos, a well-known piece of Chicago real estate for its visible location by a highway and an appearance in a Michael Bay movie.

MAT Limited Partnership put in a bid to buy the abandoned property for $6.52 million, the Chicago Tribune reported. The state announced plans to auction off the 23.4-acre riverfront property back in August.

The Chicago-based company plans to demolish the old grain silos, which were declared useless in 2005, and build a new corporate headquarters in its place. MAT’s owner, Michael Tadin Jr., said the property will also include infrastructure that will serve its trucking fleet, which currently operates out of Stockyards Industrial Park in the Back of the Yards and includes waste hauling and construction vehicles.

Work to prepare the site will likely take a year before the firm can even start planning the redevelopment, Taldin said.

The deal contributes to Gov. J.B. Prtizker’s overall plan to sell off properties in the state’s real estate portfolio that are either too old or too expensive to maintain. In a higher profile deal, it already unloaded a downtown property when Google bought the James R. Thompson Center for $105 million this summer. Officials said they estimate that sale will save taxpayers nearly $1 billion over the course of 30 years in maintenance of the dilapidated building set to be overhauled for the tech firm.

The Damen Silos property, located at 2900 South Damen Avenue along the Stevenson Expressway, was previously used to mix road-construction materials for the Illinois Department of Transportation. The almost century-old site was also the backdrop for scenes in the 2014 film “Transformers: Age of Extinction.”

MAT also helped develop the 633,000-square-foot Marina Crossings warehouse project in nearby McKinley Park.

Minimum bids of $3.25 million for the Damen Silos property were due by Oct. 19 and Illinois’ Central Management Services received four. MAT was selected as the winner with a bid more than double the floor. State officials will finalize the deal with MAT by the end of the year.

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Illinois looking to unload riverfront silos seen in Transformers film

— Victoria Pruitt