Twenty Lake to Auction Off Empty Office Building North of Chicago

Twenty Lake Holdings will auction off a 318,000-square-foot office building in Lincolnshire, north of Chicago.

The Stamford, Conn.,-based investor will put the vacant property up for bids at 2 Overlook Point, Crain’s reported. The online auction starts March 20.

The five-story building, built for corporate consultant Hewitt Associates in 1997, is part of the 330-acre Lincolnshire Corporate Center, west of Highway 45, more than 30 miles northwest of Chicago.

Twenty Lake bought the L-shaped, rust-colored office building with bands of tinted windows in 2019 for $4.4 million. Hewitt had occupied the building for a decade before subleasing it in 2007 to Walgreens, which later left the property.

While JLL is marketing the property as an opportunity for a buyer to add value by renovating it and leasing it to one or more tenants, people familiar with the auction foresee industrial developers bidding on it aiming to bulldoze and replace the building with warehousing.

Demand for logistics warehouses to distribute goods bought online has soared since the pandemic, and the Lincolnshire Corporate Center already includes warehouses.

Twenty Lake is a commercial real estate-focused affiliate of New York-based Alden Global Capital, a controversial investment firm that owns the Chicago Tribune and newspapers across the U.S. It’s not clear why the firm is selling the offices.

The 2 Overlook Point property is zoned for both office and light industrial uses, according to JLL.

Office vacancy in the Chicago suburbs ended the year at 27.9 percent, according to JLL research, up from 22.1 percent when the pandemic began in early 2020. Cushman & Wakefield pointed to a vacancy rate outside city limits last quarter of 25.2 percent.

The JLL Chicago office is marketing the building on behalf of Twenty Lake. RealInsight Marketplace is conducting the online auction.

A starting bid price wasn’t listed for the property, however recent auctions of other vacant suburban office buildings suggest buyers will start low.

A former CVS Caremark office building at 2211 Sanders Road in nearby Northbrook was sold via auction in December for nearly $2.3 million, or less than $12 per square foot, according to Cook County property records.

— Dana Bartholomew