Just One Office Building Is Under Construction In Downtown Chicago. It Could Be Years Until There’s Another
It’s a lonely time to be an office developer in Chicago.
And according to a new report, reinforcements are not exactly on the way.
Following two office deliveries in the second quarter, a 494K SF building at 360 N. Green St. in Fulton Market and a 154K SF building at 311 W. Huron St. in River North, the only new office building still under construction is 919 W. Fulton Market.
“After this building, that's it. There's nothing,” said Caitlin Ritter, research director at Transwestern.
Fulton Street Cos.’ secured financing for its 11-story Fulton Market office project last September, and the building is expected to come online early next year. But it could be the last of its kind for some time, according to an October national office report from Commercial Edge showing Chicago has one of the driest office development pipelines in the country.
Chicago, alongside Phoenix, has the smallest supply of office construction on the way nationally on a percentage-of-stock basis, with office projects accounting for only 0.3% of existing stock in both markets, the report stated. As of September, just under 828K SF of new office was in the works across the Chicago metro, less than a third of the 3.4M SF underway at this time a year ago.
That trend is likely to continue for a while, Ritter said. Though it’s difficult to predict whether the market environment will change, Ritter doesn’t see another office building entering the construction pipeline for “at least two years” after the Fulton Street Cos. project comes online.
A one-off building might pop up in a desirable neighborhood like Fulton Market, she said, but those buildings tend to be smaller and are usually less than 500K SF. It’s safe to say that another large building, like 110 North Wacker, 150 North Riverside or the Salesforce Tower, isn’t on the way anytime soon, she said.
“Those over a million SF buildings? We're not even close to anybody looking at doing anything like that,” Ritter said. “We’d just have to be in a totally different mind space for that to happen.”
Ritter said it would take three key ingredients to get construction started: a large tenant that wants a new building, lower financing costs and reduced construction expenses.
To gain significant momentum toward a robust office construction pipeline, work-from-home dynamics would have to change “radically,” and lenders would have to increase their willingness to lend to developers in the city, Ritter said. Lenders are often unwilling to finance Chicago office buildings because of the city’s tax environment and financial issues, she said.
Still, there are a number of buildings that owners could reinvest in and make top-shelf options for tenants, Ritter said. She pointed to the full renovation of 225 W. Randolph St. as a move that is drawing attention from prospective tenants.
Full-scale renovations could be as essential as new construction for the Chicago office market, Ritter said.
“The more important thing over the next few years is going to be who is actually putting money into their buildings,” she said. “The question is, do we have enough buildings with owners that are financially stable enough to even do deals? Let alone invest in their amenities and make their buildings greater.”
