Suburban Office in Shaya Prager Foreclosure Fight Snags Key Lease

A distressed Deerfield office complex caught in a $106 million foreclosure battle has secured a critical new tenant.

Vantive, the kidney care spinoff of Baxter International, has signed a headquarters lease at the 159,420-square-foot building at 510 Lake Cook Road within the Corporate 500 office campus, Vantive and the state of Illinois announced last week.

The company plans to invest $23 million into its new headquarters buildout and will add 50 full-time jobs under a tax credit agreement with the state, known as the Economic Development for a Growing Economy program.

The deal comes at a turbulent moment for the property’s ownership.

Shaya Prager’s New York-based firm Opal Holdings, which bought the four-building Corporate 500 campus for $178 million in 2021, was sued for foreclosure by lender Unify Financial Credit Union in late 2023. The litigation is still moving through court, and is one of several legal disputes involving Prager, whose company went on a massive, nationwide acquisition spree during the pandemic that employed a controversial ground-lease structure with its commercial real estate purchases.

The lawsuit claims Opal defaulted by failing to pay property taxes on the 697,000-square-foot campus. A Lake County judge appointed a receiver from Cushman & Wakefield to oversee the property’s operations during the foreclosure process.

It remains unclear who negotiated Vantive’s lease — Opal Holdings, the lender or the court-appointed receiver — or which of them will fund tenant improvement costs typically borne by ownership, such as broker commissions and interior workspace renovations. A spokesperson for Opal Holdings declined to comment, and neither a Vantive representative, the receiver nor the lender’s attorney immediately responded to requests for comment.

The lease nevertheless delivers a critical boost to the troubled campus. Corporate 500 has struggled since its longtime anchor tenant, Caterpillar, relocated its headquarters to Texas in 2022. Caterpillar’s lease reportedly extends through 2025 but the firm has sought to sublease its 116,000-square-foot footprint.

Cushman & Wakefield has marketed space in the Phase I portion of the campus at 510 Lake Cook Road since January: up to 116,071 square feet is available for sublease through December 2025 — almost 73 percent of the building — along with over 30,000 square feet of non-sublease office space spread across the first and fourth floors, according to the property’s website. The broker named online did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since then, Opal recently suffered another major tenant loss: home and security products giant Fortune Brands Innovations made plans in January to exit Corporate 500 and relocate its headquarters, deepening the vacancy. Fortune moved elsewhere within Deerfield, to the former Horizon Therapeutics campus at 1 Horizon Way.

Baxter International has long been based in Deerfield but it wasn’t guaranteed that Vantive would stay after being spun off and sold. The kidney care company was acquired by Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm The Carlyle Group for $3.8 billion in late January, raising early questions about whether it would relocate its headquarters.

But even with Vantive’s commitment, uncertainty remains around the broader stability of Corporate 500 — and whether the foreclosure process will complicate future leasing and redevelopment efforts.