Coworking Firm Backfills Space at Chicago’s Civic Opera House

Another coworking firm is backfilling space in an iconic building in Chicago’s Loop.

Chicago-based Workbox leased more than 68,000 square feet at the Civic Opera House building at 20 North Wacker Drive, Crain’s reported. The firm took over two floors from a competing operator in one of downtown’s most prominent distressed office properties.

The lease would be Workbox’s largest location and its seventh in the Chicago market. The location is expected to open in June on the 10th and 11th floors of the 915,000-square-foot Art Deco tower.

Workbox is stepping in to replace TeamWorking by TechNexus, which had operated the space since 2021 after another coworking firm, Bond Collective, vacated.

The Civic Opera building has faced significant financial distress in recent years. Its owners, a venture led by New York-based 601W Companies and Berkley Properties, were hit with a $195 million foreclosure suit in 2021 and turned over operations to a court-appointed receiver, Transwestern.

Last year, a private appraisal valued the building at $119 million, about 46 percent less than in 2015 when 601W purchased it for $220 million. Listing sites show up to 352,532 square feet of space available for office lease, making roughly 39 percent available.

Rather than a traditional lease, Workbox signed a profit-sharing agreement with the building’s operators, mirroring the structure it uses at several of its other locations. The model has grown more common among coworking firms as a way to share risk with landlords in a volatile office market.

CEO John Wallace said the company is “bullish” on Chicago and has seen demand improving across its downtown locations. Workbox recently took over former WeWork spaces in Fulton Market and the Loop.

Workbox was approached about the deal by Transwestern, which oversees leasing at the property and also represented the building in its first Workbox lease at 125 South Clark Street.

The deal has drawn criticism from TechNexus, which said in a statement that it had stabilized and upgraded the space after Bond Collective’s exit, generating “substantial revenue that benefited the building.” The coworking company said it believes reclaiming the space “is not in anyone’s best long-term interests.”

TechNexus will continue to operate on the building’s 12th floor.

Workbox now operates more than 400,000 square feet nationally, with locations in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Dallas, Salt Lake City and Columbus, Ohio.

— Judah Duke