Chicago’s Hyatt Center Trades for $625M

December 21, 2010
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Hyatt Center, the 1.5 million square-foot office high-rise at 71 Wacker Drive in Chicago, is now part of The Irvine Company’s office portfolio. Irvine Company acquired the property from Pritzker Realty Group in a transaction valued a reported $625 million, marking the company’s second major office acquisition this month.

Pritzker Realty joined forces with Higgins Development Partners to develop Hyatt Center in 2005. The 48-story tower, designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and constructed by Bovis Lend Lease Inc., sits in the city’s central business district in the coveted West Loop submarket. In addition to the premier office space, Hyatt Center features 5,000 square feet of retail space. Hyatt Hotels Corporation maintains its world headquarters in the LEED Platinum-certified building, which has a tenant roster that also includes Goldman Sachs, IBM, RBS Citizens N.A. and Pritzker Realty. J.F. McKinney & Associates had been in charge of leasing at Hyatt Center and, according to the corporate real estate services firm’s website, the building is approximately 95 percent occupied.

The sale of Hyatt Center comes on the heels of another one of the Windy City’s largest office transactions of 2010. In mid-December, Tishman Speyer wrapped up its acquisition of the 1.2 million square-foot office tower at 353 N. Clark from Mesirow Financial Real Estate for a rumored $380 million. And in July, KBS REIT II executed Chicago’s biggest office transaction of the year with the $655 million purchase of the 1.3 million square-foot office tower at 300 N. LaSalle Street.

Metropolitan Chicago’s Investment sales volume this year outpaced 2009’s total months ago. Transactions totaled $1.1 billion during the first three quarters of 2010, compared to just $383 million in the first three quarters of 2009, as per a report by commercial real estate research firm Delta Associates.

As for Irvine Company, the Hyatt Center acquisition follows the firm’s approximately $213 million purchase of the 827,000 square-foot Pacific Arts Plaza office and retail complex in Orange County, Calif., by about two weeks. Despite having shelled out nearly $1 billion on trophy office assets in the last several days, Irvine Company has been doing more than just buying–it has been doing a bit of giving, too. In June, the real estate concern announced that it had donated 20,000 acres of protected open space and parklands along the Pacific Coast to Orange County as part of the final segment of a total 50,000-acre donation.