Allstate sells Wacker Drive office building once in the running for corporate headquarters

Allstate has sold its building on Wacker Drive, two years after it purchased the property with possible plans to make it its corporate headquarters.The $11 million sale is a steep drop from when Allstate purchased the building in January 2022, CoStar first reported. It also said it sold to Chicago real estate investor and physician Sanjay Gandhi. Allstate confirmed the sale of 29 N. Wacker Drive in a statement to the Sun-Times on Friday.The insurance company bought the 10-story building from Sun Life Assurance of Canada for $29.7 million, property records show. When Sun Life acquired the property in 2010, it paid $13.4 million — making Allstate's sale the lowest recorded sale price since 2001, or as far back as property records show.

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“We no longer need this space alongside our existing Chicago pods, as we bought this building to give us options when there was less certainty post-pandemic,” Allstate said in an emailed statement. “Our real estate footprint has evolved to support our distributed workforce and provides new options that allow us to best serve our customers.”When Allstate bought the office, it said the building could serve as a replacement for its Northbrook headquarters. A majority of that sprawling suburban campus sold to Dermody Properties in 2021, a builder redeveloping the site into a warehouse complex. Allstate has previously said it wants to cut back on real estate costs as employee work schedules shifted during the pandemic. It still leases space at 444 W. Lake St. and the Merchandise Mart.The Wacker Drive building has about 133,000 rentable square feet and is comparatively one of the shorter office buildings on the street. The sale comes at a time when the office market at-large is still struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic and hybrid work. Vacancy rates are still soaring above pre-pandemic figures. Available office space throughout Chicago reached a record 23.3% in the last quarter, compared to 22% for the same period last year, according to the commercial real estate firm Colliers.Brokers on the deal did not respond to calls for comment.