Wrigley taps CBRE to sell former gum factory
(Crain's) — Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. has hired CB Richard Ellis Inc. to sell the site of its former gum factory on the Southwest Side.
The property, about 30 acres at 35th Street and Ashland Avenue, mainly would be a development site, says Mitch Adams, a first vice-president at CB Richard Ellis. A buyer might use 10% to 20% of the 1.3 million square feet of buildings on the site, he says.
The asking price is $19 million.
Production stopped in December 2006 at the plant, which opened in 1911. Wrigley moved production there to its plant in Yorkville in Kendall County.
Wrigley's offices remain on North Michigan Avenue, and the company has major operations on Goose Island. Wrigley, which was taken private last year when Mars Inc. acquired the company, also recently signed an extension for 148,000 square feet at the former Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalog House at 600 W. Chicago Ave.
Since production ended at the factory site, "we have informally explored potential sales leads, and we now have enlisted CBRE to bring a fresh approach to the formal marketing of the property," a Wrigley spokeswoman says in an e-mail.
The site is in a Planned Manufacturing District, which bars residential development. The city will not take away that designation, so the goal is to find a use that would fit for a PMD, Mr. Adams says. He does not expect a buyer to use the property for traditional manufacturing or to put up a speculative development, with no tenant lined up in advance.
The property is in the Stockyards PMD, where permissible uses include such things as a trade school, a data center or a health care operation such as a medical or dental office or a government health center.
An industrial buyer would have to have government help to make a project viable on the site, says Harvey Camins, president of Chicago-based industrial brokerage Camins Tomasz Kritt LLC.
"Otherwise it's going to be a really tough deal to make sense out of," Mr. Camins says.
The property is in a tax-increment financing district, a possible source of financial incentives.
The marketing is another example of a company trying to sell a large industrial site in the city. The 1.4-million-square-foot former Marshall Field's complex on the Northwest Side is on the market. That property, where the department store used to hold discount sales, has been vacant since early 2008.
Also for sale is the 48.5-acre former site on the West Side of steel distributor Ryerson Inc. CB Richard Ellis is in talks to sell all or part of it to buyers who would use it for a movie production operation, Mr. Adams says. Other parties also are interested, he says, declining to name them.
The Chicago Sun-Times has reported that the buyer is Chicago Film Studios LLC and that Nick Mirkoupoulos of Toronto-based Cinespace Studios and his nephew, Chicago real estate investor Alex Pissios, would be involved.
Mr. Mirkopoulos is not sure about financing for the studio, according to Wednesday's Sun-Times.
A broker for the movie production buyers did not return calls from Crain's.
(Note: This story has been corrected to reflect that the Wrigley property is in a TIF district.)
