CHICAGO-The Northern Trust Co. recently sold a 443,446-square-foot operations and data center building at 840 S. Canal St. to Red Sea Group. The compnay plans to invest more than $200 million to redevelop the property into a multitenant center that will meet the needs of local companies looking for secure data storage.

The seller had occupied the building for 10 years, and will gradually move out more than 1,100 employees through the end of August, says Geoffrey Kasselman, president of Op2mize, broker for the buyer. After Northern Trust is fully out, Kasselman says the renovation work will begin. “The buyers have a great feed of 38 MW power that still needs to be distributed and routed throughout the building. The venture also plans to install more redundancies, better security systems and more elaborate fire-proofing,” he says.

These buildings are growing exponentially because of increased business and public reliance on the Internet, Kasselman tells GlobeSt.com. There’s another large data property downtown, the Lakeside Technology Center at 350 E. Cermak, a 1.1-million-square-foot data tower owned by Digital Realty Trust, but not another large building in Chicago, Kasselman says. “There’s steady demand for that kind of space in the Loop area, this would be a bookend to the Lakeside Center,” he says. “A lot of companies learned from Sept. 11, 2001, as some of companies in the destroyed towers never came back from losing all their data. Plus you have a lot of regulations on compliance today.”

He says data centers as a product dropped somewhat after the dot-com bubble, but are now on the way back because of the reliance on mobile systems. “Everybody wants better mobility, they want to do more from their cell phones, their social networks, cloud computers, Internet gaming and television, etc. The driver of all this use is data, and these types of centers are indispensible to companies,” Kasselman says.

The sale of this property, built in the 1940s by General Electric, includes two large surface lots with off-street parking for 344 cars, a decommissioned helipad and zoning to support the future development of more than 1.1. million square feet. The top couple of floors of the building will be reserved for trading firm use, Kasselman says. A team of brokers from Jones Lang LaSalle represented Northern Trust in the transaction.