Vacant Schaumburg office building fetches $7.4M from tech company

A Los Angeles tech company bought a vacant suburban Chicago office building with plans to create an area headquarters, handing a loss to the sellers in the process.

An affiliate of UNICOM Global paid $7.4 million for an 11-story office building in the northwest suburb of Schaumburg, CoStar News reported. The property at 231 North Martingale Road will house multiple business lines for the company.

The purchase price represented a steep discount compared with the $30 million the previous owners, New York-based LXP Industrial Trust and Davidson Kempner Capital Management, spent renovating the property. Alissa Adler and John Homsher with Colliers International brokered the deal after previous full-building tenant Perdoceo Education exited the property during the pandemic, which has made it difficult to lure new occupiers into offices.

Previously called The Martingale, the 342,000-square-foot property will be renamed UNICOM Innovation Park and house a global innovation lab for the company.

It’s not the first vacant office building in Chicago’s northwest suburbs to be sold in recent months. In May, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. spent $13 million to buy the empty 10-story building at 2550 West Golf Road in Rolling Meadows, which is next door to the insurance company’s headquarters. Sellers in that deal, longtime Chicago commercial real estate investment firm Marc Realty, nabbed two-thirds more value for the property than when it bought it in 2016, even though the building had tenants six years ago. Gallagher is likely to use the property to expand its campus.

In Lincolnshire, office supply giant Staples sold off the headquarters of one of its subsidiaries for almost $22 million. The property at 100-120 Schelter Road, home to office supplier Quill, was sold for $21.8 million by an LLC sharing an address with Staples’ Massachusetts headquarters last month to Carlson Labs, a vitamins and supplements manufacturer likely to occupy the building rather than operate it as a real estate manager that leases property.

Another UNICOM business, U.S. Robotics occupies a different Schaumburg building at 1300 West Woodfield Road.

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