Target, Solo Cup, Lease Warehouses in Joliet

Target and Solo Cup will have plenty of storage in Chicagoland after inking deals for a combined 2.2 million square feet warehouse space.

The Minneapolis-based household retailer leased a 1.2-million-square-foot industrial building being built at 101 Compass Boulevard in Joliet, Crain’s reported. And the Lake-Forest based plastic cup manufacturer leased a 1-million-square-foot building at 5000 183rd Street in Country Club Hills.

Unidentified brokers at Cushman & Wakefield represented CRG in the lease, while unidentified brokers at Newmark represented Solo Cup. Terms of either deal were not disclosed.

The warehouse leases point to the strength of the Chicago industrial sector, with a record low vacancy rate of 4.5 percent at the end of last year. Developers have broken ground on 88 local industrial spec buildings, totaling a record 31.8 million square feet in 2022, according to Colliers.

“Both leases demonstrate that industrial demand hasn’t backed off much, especially for mega-sized spec warehouse projects,” Craig Hurvitz, an executive with Colliers Rosemont office, told Crain’s in an email.

In the bigger of the two recent deals, Target’s lease is the largest of its kind signed in the Chicago area in more than two years.

For its developer, Kansas City, Mo.-based NorthPoint Development, it also marks the first building leased in the 530-acre industrial park approved last May. NorthPoint is also building a $1.9 billion Compass Global Logistics Hub to the east, in an area where farmers have pushed back against pollution and traffic generated by large warehouse development, according to Crain’s.

Target has been expanding its local distribution network, opening a 1-million-square-foot warehouse in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood in 2021.

It followed up last year with leases for two smaller warehouses in Elmhurst and on Chicago’s Southwest Side, near Midway Airport. The chain also operates a 1.4-million-square-foot distribution center in DeKalb and another 1.2-million-square-foot facility in Joliet that opened in 2019, according to CoStar Group.

Target also just disclosed a $100 million plan to expand next-day deliveries by opening six new sorting centers around the country.

Solo Cup, a unit of Michigan-based Dart Container, leased a building at the Cubes at Country Club Hills, developed by St. Louis-based CRG developed near I-57 and I-80, 25 miles east of Joliet. The crossroads allows one-day shipping access to much of the U.S.

College students across the country should breathe a sigh of relief as they are likely to have no problem accessing their beloved drinking game cups.

— Dana Bartholomew