Chicago’s Wrigley Building Gets $150M Financing

By Barbra Murray

The Wrigley Building

The Wrigley Building, a celebrated fixture on Chicago’s skyline, has come under new ownership and HFF played a notable role in the transaction. The commercial real estate and capital markets services provider orchestrated $150 million in financing for Mansueto Properties’ acquisition of the approximately 460,000-square-foot office and retail asset.

Mansueto purchased The Wrigley Building, located at 400-410 N. Michigan Ave., from a BDT Capital Partners-led consortium that had snapped up the property in 2011 for $33 million.

HFF secured Mansueto’s 30-year, fixed-rate loan through a leading life insurance company. The firm saw no shortage of interest from lenders. “The lending community responded extremely favorably to this landmark property opportunity and numerous life insurance company lenders pursued and quoted this acquisition financing assignment,” Stephen Skok, a managing director with HFF, told Commercial Property Executive.

Completed in 1924, The Wrigley Building is LEED Gold and consists of two connected towers offering Class A office accommodations and 50,000 square feet of new and revitalized retail space made available as part of the previous owner’s comprehensive renovation efforts, which totaled $91 million over the last several years.

The Wrigley Building proved attractive to lenders for a bevy of reasons, including the fact that the property is 90 percent leased. Additionally, Skok noted, the existing rent roll has an average weighted lease term of eight years and features staggered maturity dates, with more than 50 percent of the tenants expiring in 2025 or later. “Moreover, the property is an iconic building located along Chicago’s famed Magnificent Mile, which is a preeminent retail location,” he added.

Let the financing flow

The Wrigley Building transaction is just one of many $100 million-plus deals HFF has orchestrated over the last month.

In June, the firm announced $150 million in financing for 1625 Plymouth, a 245,700-square-foot, build-to-suit office property in Mountain View, Calif, in Silicon Valley. June also brought news of the arrangement of a $104 million loan for the two-building, 505,085-square-foot Greensboro Park office portfolio in Tysons, Va., just outside Washington, D.C. And earlier this month, HFF announced the $250 million capitalization of Ameswell Mountain View, a mixed-use project also located in Mountain View.

Image courtesy of HFF