Chicago Illinois Real Estate Blog

Motorola Inc.’s giant former manufacturing campus in Harvard, which has stood vacant for five years, was sold this week to an investment firm that’s part of an Eastern European conglomerate.

Optima International, with offices in Miami and New York, paid less than $20 million for the 325-acre campus that includes four office and manufacturing buildings with a total of 1.57 million square feet, says Thomas Gledhill, who represented the seller, San Diego-based American Assets Inc.

An Optima executive said the firm plans to find a tenant and lease out the facility, according to media reports.

Motorola built the facility in the mid-1990s at a cost of more than $100 million to manufacture cell phones. The company closed the plant in 2003 as it scaled back manufacturing amid heavy losses.

Schaumburg-based Moto ultimately sold the complex in 2005 to the real estate investment firm American Assets for $14 million. That sale came after a deal fell through to sell to a developer who had hoped to build a water park there.

An executive with American Assets declined comment Friday. The head of Optima’s U.S. real estate investment, Chaim Schochet, didn’t return a call seeking comment. Optima, which has recently acquired two office buildings in Cleveland, makes rubber and cement in Eastern Europe and is moving into steel in the United States, according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer newspaper.
Mr. Gledhill, president of Vernon Hills-based Gledhill Properties Inc., listed the for $25 million, but he had recently lowered it to $18 million.

A non-profit group had tried to buy the campus, but Mr. Gledhill says one of the biggest problems the group faced were maintenance costs running into the millions of dollars.

Mr. Gledhill didn’t specifically target foreign buyers, but says the outcome wasn’t unexpected. “It’s not surprising at all in this market, because that’s where the money is.”

The sale to Optima was first reported by the Northwest-Herald newspaper in McHenry County.
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