French medical device manufacturer Nemera is expanding its industrial footprint in suburban Chicago.
An LLC that shares an address with the company’s Buffalo Grove production plant bought a 190,000-square-foot building on a 10-acre site at 600 Darling Drive in Vernon Hills for $26 million, according to Lake County public records. The seller was California-based real estate developer Panattoni. Neither party responded to a request for comment.
Nemera’s acquisition is part of the four-building South Lake Industrial Center, which Panattoni developed across 65 acres, a marketing brochure said. The entire development was a $100 million project, according to local news reports from the Daily Herald, and a fifth building on the site is in the works.
In addition to the Buffalo Grove manufacturing center and other facilities and offices in Europe, Nemera has an “Insight Innovation Centre” at 4660 North Ravenswood Avenue in Chicago.
Developers such as Panattoni contributed to a record jump in the available supply of industrial space in the Chicago area, according to a report from Colliers International. Since hitting a record low of 4.5 percent at the end of 2022, the vacancy rate crept up to 4.6 percent last quarter. Almost 42 million square feet of warehouse space is on track to be completed in the Chicago area this year, the largest annual total ever, with most of it still yet to be leased, Colliers found.
Panattoni entered the Chicago market in 2000 and has a 594 million-square-foot development profile that spans North America, Europe and Asia.
Elsewhere around Chicagoland, the firm is redeveloping the former Walgreens research facility in Northbrook into a $40 million industrial facility in partnership with TA Realty. It’s also behind two large developments in Aurora, a 765,000-square-foot speculative warehouse distribution facility across 54 acres in 2018 and a 357,000-square-foot speculative facility that broke ground on a 29-acre site in 2022.
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