Industrial specialists Brennan Investment Group doubled down on a 720,000-square-foot asset near O’Hare International Airport earlier this month by securing a $63 million refinancing for the property from MetLife.
It’s unclear if Brennan’s initial partner, Investcorp, remains involved with the property after the recent refinancing. An $83 million deed recorded along with the $63 million mortgage lists Brennan as the property’s owner, signaling the firm may have bought out its partner.
Rosemont-based Brennan bought the the eight-building, 955,460-square-foot industrial portfolio known as Regent O’Hare in 2020 via a joint venture with Bahrain-based Investcorp. Their $74 million purchase was backed by a $56 million loan from Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
Since then, the group sold off three of the buildings in the industrial park.
Virginia-based data center company EdgeConneX last year bought two of the buildings totaling about 182,000 square feet for $36.6 million. And in 2021, Brennan and Investcorp sold another one of the buildings to the Elk Grove Village local government for $7.5 million.
The campus is located at 921 Busse Road, just south of Interstate 90. Representatives of Brennan Investment Group and Investcorp did not respond to requests for comment.
If Brennan did buy out Investcorp’s interest in the remaining properties, it would not be the first time the two companies traded an industrial property.
Investcorp sold the 17-building Yorkbrook Business Park in Lombard to Brennan for $76 million last year.
When Brennan and Investcorp bought the O’Hare property, the industrial sector was experiencing a surge in demand as it was deemed a safer bet than other asset classes during the height of the pandemic.
The market saw significant growth from 2021 to 2023 but has shown signs of slowing over the past two years.
In the last quarter of 2021 alone, new industrial leasing activity in the Chicago suburbs reached 20 million square feet. In the first quarter of this year, that number was back down to 8 million square feet in new leases, according to JLL.
Similarly, speculative industrial development in the suburbs peaked in the third quarter of 2023 when nearly 12 million square feet of new space entered the market. That figure fell to 1.4 million in the first quarter of 2025.
Still, growth in AI and data centers are generating big ticket sales throughout the Chicago area.
In one of the biggest commercial sales of the year in 2024, Australian firm HMC Capital bought a warehouse in Elk Grove Village from Prologis for $440 million, with another $272 million on the line for the seller’s work to convert it into a data center.
Editor’s note: this post has been updated to correct the size of the portfolio that Brennan Investment Group re-financed.