SOUTH BARRINGTON, IL-Allstate, the Northbrook, IL-based insurance firm, informed local village leaders last week that it has given up its five-year effort to sell the suburban 64-acre campus, and instead plans to demolish the 516,000-square-foot office building on the site. However, the village administrator tells GlobeSt.com that the community doesn’t want to lose the building.

The firm put its Allstate Campus at 51 W. Higgins up for sale in October 2007, asking $44 million through the former Colliers Bennett & Kahnweiler Inc. However, no buyers have been found during a time where more than a quarter of all office space has been vacant in suburban Chicago for a number of quarters. The property is in the hardest hit Northwest market, which had a vacancy rate of 28.2% in the fourth quarter, according to a Grubb & Ellis report.
The campus was built in 1982, and includes a lake and walking trails. At one time, Allstate employed more than 1,500 employees there, with an 800-seat cafeteria, a 200-seat auditorium and 37 conference rooms. “It’s a beautiful building,” South Barrington administrator Mark Masciola tells GlobeSt.com. “It’s just been a problem to find a replacement user. The property, pretty much on its own, has frontage on Interstate 90 and access off of Higgins.”
There have been a few large office campuses for sale in the suburbs, with some successes and some failures. Most recently, Duke Realty finished a rework of the 87-acre former Alcatel-Lucent campus for Navistar in Lisle, IL.

Masciola says Allstate met with village staff last week to announce the plan for demolition. Masciola says the village has protested the idea, and wants to meet more to come up with another solution. “We’re exploring options on what could be done to avoid a tearing down,” he says. “It’s early, but that is their intent.”