The jungle hogs are prowling, but it’s no nightmare.
“I just hope nobody punches us and wakes us up,” said George Cibula, president of Bensenville-based Darwin Realty & Development Corp., which develops, sells, leases and manages commercial and industrial real estate.
Jungle hogs are what Cibula calls big users of warehouse and distribution space, ranging from auto parts supplies to electronics companies to Beanie Babies, and they are driving his business.
Darwin and McShane Corp. recently broke ground for the development of Naper-Crossings Two, a 324,000-square-foot, multitenant warehouse and distribution facility at the Naper-Crossings Commerce Center in Bolingbrook.
Construction started with no tenants (it does have a long-term investor, Lincoln National Insurance Co. of Ft. Wayne, Ind.) but Cibula isn’t worried.
“Everybody’s looking to expand, and we’ve had very good luck keeping our buildings full,” he said. “It hasn’t been this good since I’ve been in the business.”
Darwin also owns what’s called a third-party logistics company, which stores and delivers products for other companies, and the logistics firms are also gobbling up warehouse space, Cibula said.
Chicago is the nation’s largest industrial real estate market, with almost 920 million square feet of space, and the vacancy rate is only 7.6 percent, according to second-quarter figures from CB Richard Ellis.
That rate has been steady despite the fact that new warehouses are going up all over the area. Bolingbrook, which has a lot of land adjacent to Interstate Highways 355 and 55, is one of the hot spots. Gleaming new facilities in parklike settings line the expressways.
“It’s one of the only places left to build bigger buildings,” Cibula said, pointing out that Bolingbrook only seems remote; it actually is as close to the Loop as Schaumburg is.
He added that tenants are moving out of closer-in suburbs like Elk Grove Village and Melrose Park, where the warehouses have less space for truckers to park their trailers and awkwardly placed docks, creating bottlenecks in today’s world of just-in-time inventory shifting.
Cibula attributes the booming market for new space to the steady increases in population and consumption and the obsolescence of older facilities.
So is it a case of build a modern warehouse in the southwest suburbs and tenants will invariably come?
“It’s bad luck to say that, but everybody’s been successful,” he said.
Behemoth: Big as the industrial warehouses are, most will be dwarfed by the Ikea Home Furnishings store being built at the Northwest Tollway and Interstate Highway 290 in Schaumburg.
At more than 410,000 square feet, it will most likely be the biggest stand-alone store in the country and the biggest Ikea store in the Western Hemisphere.
The three-story structure, designed as an octagon on a platform, is almost as big as a lot of major shopping centers, and will include a 350-seat Swedish restaurant and two other food outlets, plus a play area for kids.
“It’s like a Crate and Barrel with a thyroid problem,” said Andrew Koglin, president of Chicago-based Koglin Wilson Architects, which is doing the architectural work on the store, which is set to open in November.
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Koglin said that Swedish furnishings giant Ikea AB, which has realms of consumption on an even vaster scale in Sweden and Denmark, altered its design slightly from its stores in Europe, where they are constructed of metal panels in the bold royal blue–accented with yellow–of the Swedish flag.
For Schaumburg, Ikea decided to tone the color down to a more sedate navy blue and use precast concrete construction, he said.
Koglin said village officials initially expressed concern that a blue store would look out of place, but–paradoxically–when they realized how big the store would be, they were won over.
“That it was a unique building appealed to Schaumburg, even though they weren’t excited about it being blue,” said Koglin. “The city has a collective ego that’s pretty large . . . as a retailing mecca.”
The lesson: If you’re going to be blue, be big blue, sort of like IBM.
Piece of the Goose: CenterPoint Properties Corp., a real estate investment trust specializing in industrial space in the area, officially moved its headquarters from downtown Chicago to Oak Brook Monday.
But CenterPoint is still buying property in Chicago. The company recently acquired a 140,000-square-foot plant on the Near North Side’s Goose Island from Outer Circle products and leased it back to the company, which designs and produces plastic containers.