Suburban Chicago Office Properties Poised for Resi Redo

A pair of office properties in the northwest suburbs are ripe for residential development.

In Wheeling, the village board has greenlit entrepreneur Boris Stratiesvsky’s proposal to transform a vacant office building into a mixed-use complex with 55 apartment units and more than 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, the Daily Herald reported.

Separately, Lexington Homes is poised to transform a vacant tract in Arlington Heights into a residential community.

The Wheeling project, called Forest View, involves the three-story, 74,000-square-foot building at 350 East Dundee Road, which was previously occupied by Solex College and Cole Taylor Bank.

Redevelopment plans started in 2022 and were presented to the village board nearly a year later. Three key elements were approved: rezoning the property to allow commercial and residential development, granting a preliminary special-use permit, and approving a subdivision of the property.

Meanwhile, the 8-acre site in Arlington Heights, at the intersection of South Arlington Heights and Seegers roads, housed an old office complex until its recent demolition.

The complex, spanning 101,000 square feet, was sold to Lexington Homes for $3.3 million in January 2023. The property’s shift from from commercial to residential use aligns with its South Arlington Heights Road Corridor Plan, adopted in 2018.

“There’s been some preliminary conversations about some other potential development that would be consistent with the South Arlington Heights Road Corridor Plan, but nothing formal has been submitted,” Charles Witherington-Perkins, the village’s director of planning and community development, told the outlet.

A previous attempt to redevelop the site faltered in 2021, when negotiations between Trammell Crow Company, Allegro Senior Living and village officials stalled over tax increment financing assistance.

Both projects shed light on the beleaguered state of Chicagoland’s office sector, which has been pummeled by remote-work trends and tough lending standards. Suburban Chicago’s office vacancy rate rose to a record-high of 30.2 percent in the fourth quarter, as companies continued to slash their footprints in response to evolving workspace needs.

Struggling office properties have been a prime target for redevelopments. In Glenview, for instance, Dermody Properties is converting the former Allstate campus into a 10-building, 3.2 million-square-foot logistics park.

In Skokie, GW Properties has a $90 million plan to turn the 355,000-square-foot Old Orchard Towers office complex into 245 apartments.

—Quinn Donoghue