A New York-based investor is looking to sell a well-located but vacant loft building in Chicago as part of the firm’s ongoing sell-off of office space throughout the world.
W.P. Carey has hired Cushman & Wakefield brokers to find a buyer of the seven-story building at 550 W. Randolph St., according to a marketing brochure.
The offering includes a vacant, 168,750-square-foot downtown building constructed in 1909, as well as 11,500 square feet of adjacent land currently used as 26 surface parking spaces.
W.P. Carey in recent years had sought to potentially expand the property by building into the parking lot, but it never landed anchor tenants to kick off the project.
Then the firm in 2023 announced it was exiting the office space entirely to focus on industrial properties.
At the time, W.P. Carey said it would sell office properties throughout the world, including putting 59 of them into a spin-off real estate investment trust called Net Lease Office Properties.
Since announcing plans to liquidate its office properties, W.P. Carey sold off a 70-property portfolio in Spain about a year ago for $359 million.
The vacant Chicago building and the sold Spain portfolio are not part of the Net Lease REIT, whose dispositions have included a nearly $61 million sale of a campus near Minneapolis that is fully leased to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.
There were 39 remaining Net Lease properties at the end of 2024, according to a statement announcing sales last week.
The company did not respond to a request for comment from CoStar News on Tuesday.
The 550 W. Randolph deal is being framed as an opportunity to follow through on redeveloping and potentially expanding the property for new office tenants or an office user that wants to own its own property.
Surface parking also could instead be redeveloped for a ground-up residential project, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Pricing is expected in the range of $15 million to $20 million for the property that W.P. Carey has owned since 1990, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, which first reported the property going on the market for sale.
The Randolph Street building is along the western edge of the Loop business district, along the Ogilvie Transportation Center and just a short walk from the fast-expanding Fulton Market district.
The offering faces stiff headwinds in the office sector, with historically low demand throughout the country, higher borrowing costs and other factors pushing down values.
A high-vacancy, 16-story building at 550 W. Washington Blvd. recently sold for $18.5 million, a fraction of the $111 million it previously sold for in 2013.
That sale just down the street from 550 W. Randolph was among three end-of-2024 sales that collectively shaved almost a half-billion dollars from previous valuations.
For the record
The seller is represented by Cushman & Wakefield brokers Tom Sitz, Cody Hundertmark and Dan Deuter.