Takeda Pharmaceuticals is expanding its space in a more than 1 million-square-foot former Motorola Mobility campus in Chicago’s far northern suburbs, just a little more than a year after the property sold for $35 million.
The Japanese drugmaker has signed a new lease for 79,521 square feet within the Innovation Park campus in Libertyville, Illinois, according to Chicago developer R2.
R2 and investment partner JDI Realty bought the 83-acre campus late last year for a price far below the $47 million that a previous owner spent buying and redeveloping the property where Motorola once made mobile phones, including the popular Razr model.
The deal with Takeda is an early validation of the new owners’ investment thesis that tenants wanting traditional offices and other uses, such as laboratories, would be drawn to the property.
Since buying the former corporate campus and upgrading amenities, the R2 venture has since rebranded the property from its longer previous name, Innovation Park Lake County. The campus includes several connected low-rise structures located along U.S. Highway 45.
Takeda already was a tenant in one of the buildings, leasing 26,152 square feet of office space at 1950 Innovation Way, according to R2. Under the new deal, Takeda is adding lab and medical-grade industrial space at 1930 Innovation Way.
The Innovation Park property is now about 68% leased, a figure set to drop when Medline Industries moves out in a few months, according to R2 Partner Zack Cupkovic. But the property has a pipeline of other potential leases fueled by the multiple uses available at Innovation Park, and the financial woes of other north suburban office buildings, which leaves them unable to fund new deals, Cupkovic said.
“We’ve had great activity,” he said. “Tenants like it because it’s an incredibly amenitized space, as good as anything downtown, and we have the flexibility to do a mix of lab, industrial and office.”
R2 has upgraded amenities such as the onsite fitness center and bistro and plans to start building move-in-ready spec suites soon, Cupkovic said.
Takeda, which moved its U.S. headquarters from Deerfield, Illinois, to the Boston area in 2019, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CoStar News.
The company told Crain’s Chicago Business, which earlier reported the new deal, that it is an expansion in the northern suburbs rather than a relocation of an existing function.
Takeda is taking over space previously used by Bristol Myers Squibb, which earlier this year announced it was closing a gene-therapy manufacturing facility there.