American Landmark Selling Portion of Skokie Life Science Campus

The developer behind the Illinois Science & Technology Park in Skokie wants to offload one lab building and adjacent land.

American Landmark Properties, led by president Yisroel Gluck, has hired JLL brokers to sell the 135,800-square-foot building at 8030 Lamon Avenue, along with a 9-acre tract that’s ripe for development, CoStar reported.

The listing comes more than two years after American Landmark sold two buildings on the 23-acre property for more than $75 million. That’s just $2 million less than what the company paid for the entire life science campus in 2017.

The available lab building, fresh off a $20 million renovation, is on the verge of being 35 percent preleased. The adjacent land can accommodate nearly 1.3 million square feet of development and parking, while providing an opportunity to collect recurring administrative revenue from the campus.

It’s unclear how much American Landmark expects to make with the offering, but the firm has already enjoyed a sizable return on investment. In addition to the $75 million sale of the two buildings, American Landmark raked in over $36 million in late 2021, when it sold a medical office building in the same development to Florida-based TopMed Realty.

However, the market has taken a turn for the worse since then, as commercial real estate grapples with high interest rates and tough lending standards, which have hampered deals across much of the nation since last year.

Life science and medical facilities are performing relatively strong, though, whereas retail and office assets are still climbing out from the pitfalls of the pandemic.

Apart from the lab building that’s on the market, the Illinois Science & Technology Park is over 93 percent occupied, the outlet reported, citing JLL.

Several large-scale life science projects are in Chicago’s development pipeline, including Trammell Crow Company’s 725,000-square-foot Fulton Labs campus in West Loop. A joint venture of Trammell Crow and Beacon Capital Partners is also developing Hyde Park Labs — a 300,000-square-foot facility near the intersection of 52nd Street and Harper Avenue — and another life science facility in north suburban Evanston.

—Quinn Donoghue