It sure looks like Amazon has inked one of the biggest industrial deals in Edens corridor this year.
The e-commerce giant just posted a job listing at 3639 Howard Street in Skokie, a 237,000-square-foot industrial facility in the Skokie Commerce Center that had been on the market until an announcement was made this morning.
“We were marketing the building, and it is no longer on the market,” said Cushman & Wakefield’s Jason West, who was handling leasing at the building.
The building, a last-mile warehouse facility, is owned by Texas-based Hillwood Investment Properties, which claims to have built about 183 million square feet of industrial properties across North America and Europe.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, but Jeff Bezos’s company has been gobbling up warehouse space across the country.
In an earnings call in July, Amazon’s chief financial officer said the company was rapidly building out its capacity for one-day delivery service. “We saw some additional transition costs in our warehouses. We saw some lower productivity as we were expanding rather quickly,” Brian Olsavsky said on the call. “We also saw some costs were moving — buying more inventory and moving inventory around in our network to have it be closer to customers.”
Chicago’s industrial sector has been particularly hot, with developers showing no inclination to slow down. Some 18 projects totaling 4.7 million square feet of industrial space came online in the second quarter, according to a report from Colliers International. That’s the most new space delivered in a single quarter since the end of 2017. The same report found that more than 12 million square feet of space would be delivered by the end of the year.
Since 2013, 227 speculative industrial projects totaling 61 million square feet have been delivered. More than 68 percent of that space has been leased.