CHICAGO—Hillwood Investment Properties, a Perot company, has just acquired 49 acres of land at Laraway Crossings Business Park from Ryan Companies, Inc. in the I-80 submarket of Chicago in Joliet, its second land acquisition in the Chicago industrial market in the past 45 days. The company plans to break ground on a class A distribution center totaling 746,772 square feet later this month and complete it by mid-year 2016.

“We believe the timing is very good for a building of this size,” Don Schoenheider, Hillwood senior vice president and market leader for the Midwest, tells GlobeSt.com. “There is only one other building in the area with more than 700,000 square feet, and it's not really in the I-80 submarket.” It's more than likely that Hillwood will lease the big building to just one tenant, although the space can be split between several.

The Dallas-based company has quickly ramped up to become one of the region's major industrial developers. In the next 30 to 45 days, it will have about 1.15 million square feet of space under construction, Schoenheider adds. As reported in GlobeSt.com, the company opened a Chicago-based office earlier this year, and recently acquired 39 acres at Pinnacle Business Park in suburban Romeoville where it plans to build four class A industrial buildings totaling 638,110 square feet.