July 2012
Fulton Cold Storage Slides to New Facility
As seen in GlobeSt
Also mentioned in RE Journals
LYONS, IL-A cold storage firm that had occupied the Fulton Market Cold Storage building in downtown Chicago, where Sterling Bay is seeking office conversion approval, has found a new 75,354-square-foot home here. Hasak Cold Storage, owned by Amit Hasak, signed a 10-year lease at 8424 W. 47th St., which is owned by Chicago-based Bridge Development Partners.
Hasak is moving from 1000 W. Fulton St. in downtown Chicago, where Sterling Bay has a rezoning request to change the 10-story cold storage building into offices and restaurants. Hasak’s former company name was Fulton Market Cold Storage Co.
In Lyons, the 312,000-square-foot building is in the Near Southwest market, near Interstate 55. Bridge purchased the building for about $14.3 million from Voorhees, NJ-based United States Cold Storage in December. The seller still occupies about half the building.
Though Hasak reportedly said he wanted to move away from the high-traffic, gentrifying area downtown, Tony Pricco, a principal with Bridge, tells GlobeSt.com that cold storage tenants still want to be as close to the city as possible. Pricco also says that there’s a high barrier to entry for cold storage facilities, and while this facility was built in the mid-1970s, it is well-maintained.
“Replacement cost for this building would have been in the $125-per-square-foot range,” Pricco says. “It would cost even more, around $200 per square foot, for the high tech requirements today. A lot of institutions don’t like to invest in cold storage, there’s a lot of hands on maintenance, you have to have full-time engineers to keep up the systems. You have to know what you’re getting into, you can’t just buy it and collect the checks.”
Peter Block, Vern Schultz and Tom Condon with Colliers International represented Hasak in the lease, while Steve Connolly and Larry Much with NAI Hiffman represented Bridge. An additional 15,425-square-foot recent five year lease to Registry Steaks and Seafood Ltd. brings the property to 77% leased, Pricco says.
