Onni lands West Loop lease expansion with cybersecurity firm

Tel Aviv-based Coro is more than doubling its office footprint

550 West Van Buren Street and Eddie Viliunas with JLL (Loopnet, JLL)
550 West Van Buren Street and Eddie Viliunas with JLL (Loopnet, JLL)

Coro is expanding its West Loop office footprint to make room for a wave of new hires.

The Israeli cybersecurity software company leased 21,000 square feet on the 13th floor of the building at 550 West Van Buren Street, Crain’s reported. The firm will move out of its current 6,000-square-foot office that it occupied on the same building’s 15th floor.

Coro’s move to a larger office comes less than eight months after the firm moved into the 17-story office building. At the time of the April move, the company said it had 67 Chicago employees that would use the office space with plans to have 200 local workers next year.

Onni Group bought the 362,000-square-foot office building for $78 million in March 2019 when it was 91 percent leased. Before Coro’s expansion, the building’s occupancy had dropped to 74 percent. The largest tenant is Huron Consulting, which has a lease for almost 134,000 square feet through September 2027.

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Coro’s deal provides a small boost to an otherwise lackluster Chicago office leasing market, as downtown vacancy still sits near records of around 20 percent coming out of the pandemic, commercial brokerages have reported. JLL’s Eddie Viliunas negotiated the lease expansion for Coro, while Ben Cleveland and Mark Gunderson of Stream Realty Partners represented Onni.

Still, Onni Group has proposed building another office tower in Fulton Market, a part of the city that, along with the area southwest of the Loop where Coro is expanding, has proven more resilient than the Loop against the pandemic’s battering of the office market. The Vancouver, Canada-based developer is pursuing city approval for a 457-foot-tall, 29-story tower at 357 North Green Street, across the street from Sterling Bay’s 360 North Green project. The project will rise above the Kennedy Expressway, a portion of which sits underground the property and runs diagonally through it from below.

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— Victoria Pruitt