Liberty Property Trust has purchased a distribution center in Franklin Park for $8 million as an investment, the company said.
The 73,160-square-foot industrial building at 11222 Melrose Ave. was originally built in 2004, says Neal Driscoll, Liberty’s vice president and city manager for the region and is 53 percent leased to Spider Staging and Staples.
“Given our recent success in Des Plaines, we have been carefully searching for other investment opportunities in the O’Hare submarket,” said Driscoll, in a statement. He expects the facility to be attractive to businesses due to its visibility on I-294 and close proximity to rail, road and air transportation.
Liberty specializes in commercial real estate in both the United States and United Kingdom. It currently has over 691 properties that provide office, distribution and light manufacturing facilities to 1,600 tenants. In the Chicago region Liberty’s properties are concentrated around O’Hare International Airport, the I-55 Corridor, the Aurora/I-88 submarket, the Minooka/Elwood/I-80 Corridor, and Central DuPage.
“It’s a well located building. It’s in the O’Hare market. It’s close to everything,” said John P. Schneider, Franklin Park director of community development and zoning. “And for someone that is an investor in property, this is kind of why people are buying and building in the O’Hare area.”
Schneider credits studies, such as the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s industrial study of Franklin Park, for elevating the village in the eyes of developers.
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“Franklin Park’s got the transportation and it’s directly next to the tollway. I mean, you’ve got 170,000 cars that go by that building every day,” he said. “I think those kind of studies are getting people interested in us, because we’re really close to O’Hare. Other cities aren’t as close as we are.”