Amazon has paid $195 million for the Midwest’s first multi-story logistics facility, closing a deal that hands vertical warehousing its biggest proof of concept outside the coasts and sets a new pricing benchmark for infill industrial in one of the country’s most active urban logistics markets.
The e-commerce giant purchased the property at 1237 W. Division St. in Chicago — a 571,423-square-foot, two-story distribution building — from Logistics Property Co. in a transaction arranged by JLL Capital Markets and announced Thursday. The price worked out to approximately $267 per square foot, according to Commercial Property Executive, compared with the roughly $100-per-square-foot average at which Chicago industrial assets have been changing hands through 2026. That gap is not a market aberration; it is a direct consequence of what the building is.
Completed in 2024, the LEED-certified facility occupies 14 acres just off Interstate 90, roughly 2.5 miles from Chicago’s central business district and within 14 miles of both O’Hare International Airport and Midway International Airport. Its two-story format puts it in a category that has existed in Tokyo and Singapore for decades but had never been built in the Midwest before Logistics Property Co. broke ground here in 2022. Clear heights on both levels exceed 34 feet. The 56 loading docks are paired with 135-foot truck courts, and a dedicated ramp gives full-size delivery vehicles direct access to the second floor — an engineering feature that eliminates the bottleneck of ground-level staging during peak dispatch windows. A 292,500-square-foot rooftop parking deck and an adjacent five-level structure holding up to 1,590 cars and 763 delivery vans provide the vehicle capacity to run last-mile operations at scale. Ware Malcomb was the architect. The property qualifies for Chicago’s Class 6B tax abatement and Enterprise Zone incentives…