PCCP, Panattoni Buy Land for Suburban Chicago Industrial Project

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Jim Galovan, PCCP

PCCP L.L.C. is working with a new partner, Panattoni Development Co. Inc., and together the companies will acquire a 51-acre parcel of land in Lockport, Ill., for the creation of a new industrial park. The joint venture will add 846,500 square feet of Class A offerings to the metropolitan Chicago market with the development of Lockport 355.

Sited in the I-55 Corridor submarket, Lockport 355 will consist of four warehouse and distribution buildings designed to accommodate multiple tenants or a single user, but it’s the smaller user that’s higher on PCCP’s radar.

“In this market we see more opportunities for rent growth and less competition in building smaller product and catering to smaller tenants, as this project does, rather than going head-to-head with a higher number of bulk distribution projects that are available at this time,” Jim Galovan, managing director with PCCP, told Commercial Property Executive.

The joint venture expects to kick-off construction of the first phase of Lockport 355 in June, with plans of delivering a 274,000-square-foot building and a 228,700-square-foot building in the first quarter of 2016.

Metropolitan Chicago’s industrial market has been on the upswing for some time now. Per a report by commercial real estate services firm Colliers International, in the first quarter of 2015 the overall vacancy rate declined for the seventh consecutive quarter, dropping to roughly 7.6 percent and marking the Chicago area’s lowest vacancy rate since the third quarter of 2001.

“With Chicago positioned as a primary industrial market serving the center of the country, it is a strong beneficiary of the overall growth of e-commerce and logistics nationally,” Galovan added. “The local economy has also been strengthening over the past couple of years.”