Raja Foods Purchases Industrial Property for $32 Million

A local food company joined the end-of-the-year rush into pricey industrial real estate deals with a purchase of a newly built asset in the tight market near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

An LLC with ties to Chicago-based Raja Foods, an Indian food company, purchased the building at 3700 Rose Street in Schiller Park late last month for $32.5 million, according to Cook County property records.

Raja purchased the property from an LLC that appears to be affiliated with GO2 Logistics, a Chicago-based freight transportation and logistics company. Neither company responded to a request for comment.

As its construction finished within the last several months, it’s unclear whether the property was developed on a speculative basis, with no intended client, or with Raja Foods in mind.

According to a LoopNet listing for the nine-acre property that is no longer active, the site features industrial cooling and refrigeration and cold storage. The 176,000-square-foot building is designed for a single tenant and includes 37 docks.

Raja’s purchase is among a flood of large industrial deals to have closed in the final days of 2022, which included near-record transaction volume within the asset class that was projected to fall a tad short of the record set in 2021 for U.S. industrial sales of $125 billion, according to CoStar.

While single warehouse properties such as Raja Foods’ newly bought facility as well as a Carol Stream asset purchased by Cabot Properties for $33.8 million made Chicago-area contributions late in the year, even bigger portfolio deals took place in recent weeks. San Francisco-based Stockbridge, which was the seller to Cabot, also sold a $70 million portfolio in Elk Grove Village near O’Hare to Boston-based TA Realty last month. And Clear Height Properties spent more than $100 million to pick up dozens of properties, most of them in DuPage County, in the final days of the year.

While industrial markets tightened this year as demand hovered near record levels, with only a 2.8 percent vacancy rate among Chicago area industrial properties as of the third quarter, the market showed hints of an upcoming slowdown in the fourth quarter. Vacancy rose for the second-straight three-month period for the first time since the pandemic to close the year at 4.6 percent, according to Savills.

Still, rent growth hasn’t stopped, and ended the year at $5.60 per square foot asking rates, more than 15 percent higher than the previous year.