Olam to lease 80K sf in Brookfield’s Marshall Field building

Brookfield Properties scored a new lease for its Marshall Field building in the heart of the Loop as the historic property continues putting small dents in downtown Chicago’s sky-high vacancy rate.

Olam International, a Singapore-based food ingredient supplier, inked a 15-year deal to occupy 80,000 square feet at 24 East Washington Street, Crain’s reported. JLL brokers Matt Carolan and Christine Bower represented Olam in the deal, while Jack O’Brien and JD Parcheta of Telos represented Brookfield.

The lease signing is a rare example of a company upping its footprint during a time when demand for office space is at an all-time low. Most companies these days are downsizing their operations amid the remote-work era and corporate layoffs, which have contributed to office vacancy records being set in nine of the last 11 quarters.

Olam will leave behind its 35,000-square-foot space at 200 West Jackson Boulevard, which is owned by Nightingale Properties, a landlord at the center of a scandal involving crowdfunding real estate fundraising platform CrowdStreet and missing funds raised from retail investors to buy properties with Nightingale in Atlanta and Miami Beach.

Olam, led by CEO Sunny Verghese, also has a small office in the southwest suburb of Willowbrook and a 183,000-square-foot cocoa processing facility in Bolingbrook, the outlet said. It’s unclear if the company will relocate any of its workers to the Marshall Field building. 

The Olam lease is a big win for Brookfield. The Toronto-based firm performed a major overhaul on the upper floors that it owns at the site in 2018, and the timing couldn’t have been worse with the pandemic hitting just two years later. Brookfield’s 650,000-square-foot portion of the building was just 50 percent leased prior to the Olam deal, as many of Chicago’s biggest office deals since the pandemic shifted toward Fulton Market’s newer buildings as demand sank in the Loop.

Yet the Marshall Field building might be gaining momentum this year. In February, Brookfield landed a 31,000-square-foot lease there with Indianapolis-based logistics firm Spot.

— Quinn Donoghue

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