Takeda Wants To Sell Deerfield Headquarters Within 6 Months

DEERFIELD, IL — Takeda Pharmaceuticals has listed its 70-acre Deerfield campus for sale, and it hopes to find a buyer by the end of its fiscal year in April, according to the Chicago Tribune. The property includes 660,000 square feet of existing buildings and room for another 75,000 square feet of potential development.

Takeda announced in June it would shut down its U.S. headquarters and relocate its roughly 1,000 jobs to Massachusetts. The move followed the Japanese drugmaker's purchase of the Irish pharmaceutical company Shire, which has its American headquarters in the Boston area.

Takeda has selected commercial real estate broker Savills to market the property to potential buyers, the Tribune reported.

Broker Eric Feinberg, co-head of the Chicago region for Savills, did not specify how much the corporate campus might command, according to the Tribune. He said Takeda would prefer to sell the entire campus to a single buyer, but will consider offers to sell off parts of the site.

Despite a trend of corporate relocation from the suburb to downtown Chicago, the Deerfield area still has a great deal of intellectual capital in the pharmaceutical industry, Feinberg told the paper.

Takeda, Walgreens Boots Alliance and Mondelez International are moving a combined 2,700 jobs out of the Deerfield area by early next year, leaving Lake County with one of the highest overall vacancy rates in the Chicago suburbs, according to the Tribune.

At the end of the second quarter of 2019, Savills Research found the north suburbs had a 31.4 availability rate, second only to the northwest corridor. It found more than half of all large transactions took place in the east-west corridor submarket and nearly a third of major transactions were in the health care industry.

In 2006, Takeda built its corporate headquarters west of Interstate 294 and north of Lake Cook Road on a 70-acre site it purchased from Baxter International. From 2003 to 2013, Takeda reportedly received more than $60 million in state tax credits — more than any other business in the state — in exchange for a promise to create 566 new jobs. As of 2017, the company had 1,700 employees in its three buildings at the site.

If sold all at once, the sale price of the three-building Deerfield campus could rival AbbVie's $154 million acquisition of a 559,000-square-foot headquarters in Mettawa, which closed in August 2018.

Read more:

• Takeda To Vacate Deerfield Headquarters By Year's End
• Takeda To Close Deerfield Headquarters, Move 1,000 Jobs To Boston
• Mettawa Building Becomes Biggest Suburban Office Sale In 2 Years
• Takeda Pharmaceuticals Relocates Some Of Its 1,700 Employees In Deerfield