Ivanhoe and Hines to Build $300M Chicago Office Tower

By Gabriel Circiog, Associate Editor

Ivanhoe Cambridge and Hines have partnered to develop a 45-story office tower in the West Loop in downtown Chicago. The announcement came from Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said the $300 million project is “a vote of confidence for our city, welcome news for the local economy and a signal that Chicago is leading the nation in job creation and economic development.”

The office tower, River Point, will be developed by Hines at 444 West Lake Street on land co-owned by local investor Larry Levy. Architectural firm Pickard Chilton designed the high-rise, which will feature approximately 900,000 square feet of leasable class AA space and is LEED Gold pre-certified. The project also calls for the construction of a 1.5-acre public park that will be built, in part, using TIF resources from the city of Chicago.

Construction of the project is expected to begin before year’s end, whilst tenant occupancy will start in early 2016. The project will create 1,000 construction jobs and ultimately house 3,400 permanent office jobs. River Point will be Chicago’s biggest real estate project launched in the past five years and the first in over a decade to be built without an anchor tenant already secured.

Greg Van Schaack, managing director with Hines, told Commercial Property Executive: “We had been planning this since 2005. It was two-thirds leased to two major companies in 2008 but, when Lehman [Brothers] collapsed and things got dicey, we terminated the two leases and the project sat on the shelf.”

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