Vista secures Fetch Rewards for West Loop lease expansion

Vista Property Group notched its latest win as a Chiagco office landlord with a West Loop deal that gave developers eyeing new buildings an encouraging sign of commercial space demand.

Mobile app company Fetch Rewards inked a lease with New York-based Vista for 21,000 square feet at 609 West Randolph Street, a 100,000-square-foot property the landlord completed earlier this year, Crain’s reported.

The deal marks an expansion for Fetch, which gives benefits to customers who upload images of their shopping receipts and is taking the top three floors of the Vista building.

The deal echoes downtown office trends of tenants leaving older buildings that haven’t been recently updated for newly built offices featuring amenities and workspace that spurs workers to show up to the office more often than working remotely.

While Fetch is based in Madison, Wisconsin, the company’s largest office is in Chicago. The firm will move 226 employees from its current 14,000-square-foot office at 300 South Riverside Plaza, which is owned by Third Millennium Group and David Werner Real Estate.

Fetch leased the new space because it needed more to accommodate a growing workforce, while the company also specified that in-office time requirements would still be determined by various department heads, rather than mandating the same policy for all categories of workers.

Although the deal amounts to a boon for the office leasing market and demonstrates further tenant demand for developers to complete new office projects, it removes only a relatively small chunk of space from a downtown Chicago office market featuring loads of vacancies that’s taken a toll on some landlords.

Vacancy in downtown office buildings hit a record high in the third quarter, but available Class A or other top-tier space dropped to 14.7 percent, down from the 17 percent available at the same time of the year in 2021, according to data from CBRE.

Fetch, which also has offices in New York and Alabama, employs more than 800 people, up from the 112 workers the company had at the beginning of 2020. Since then, the company’s Chicago office has grown from 42 employees.

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— Victoria Pruitt