Molto To Develop Two Suburban Chicago Logistics Parks Amid Ever-Narrowing Big-Box Market
Molto Properties is developing two logistics parks totaling over 2M SF in Minooka and Romeoville, Illinois, welcome news for a market in which industrial property is hitting new highs for scarcity.
Minooka Ridge Business Park, a 110-acre multiphase logistics park at 1001 Midpoint Road, will offer 1.7M SF of new distribution facilities, while the Weber55 Logistics Park at the northeast corner of Weber and Taylor roads in Romeoville will be a roughly 628K SF cross-dock facility.
“With existing big box vacancy below 2% in both submarkets, the area remains greatly underserved," Molto Vice President Kevin Mohoney said in a release. "We’re confident these buildings will help satisfy growing user demand for modern distribution facilities.”
Both projects are set to break ground later this month and are scheduled for completion in the second quarter of 2023.
The Minooka Ridge Business Park offers direct access to Interstate 80 and 30 acres of land set aside for future expansion that could accommodate more than 569K SF of additional space. Weber55, in the Interstate 55 corridor, will include two buildings, with plans calling for a cross-dock distribution facility for Building I and a single-load distribution facility for Building II.
The announcement comes at a time when big-box industrial vacancy has fallen to never-before-seen lows in the Chicago metro, with existing vacancy at 2.61%. As of Q1 2022, just six big-box spaces of 300K SF or more were vacant in the entirety of the metro area, per a Colliers report.
“The market fundamentals in Chicago have never been better and we are eager to break ground on both these developments in this environment,” Molto Managing Principal Todd Naccarato said. “Supply chain disruptions have resulted in an uptick in demand, but also required developers to rethink building features and so we have designed these projects with today’s tenant requirements in mind.”
Molto, which has acquired and developed 13M SF-plus of industrial real estate valued at roughly $1.1B since its 2008 founding, said it is also developing more than 3M SF in Texas, California and in the Midwest.
