CHICAGO—On Tuesday Motorola Solutions announced it was leaving the suburbs and headed downtown, largely to help it continue recruiting a young, tech-savvy workforce. But the employee base of some technology-based firms remains suburban, and many of these will remain in place as they build new facilities to accommodate growth.

Renishaw Inc., for example, has hired the Opus Group to develop a two-story, 133,000 square foot office and warehouse facility at Oakview Business Park in suburban West Dundee. The new facility, its new North American headquarters, will replace two existing suburban sites and include 47,000 square feet of warehouse space and 86,000 square feet of offices. It will also house a central IT hub for its North American operations, an open, two-story windowed exhibit hall, and a training and demonstration space for customers.

"This company manufactures precision measuring and motion control devices, and it is seeing its market pick up," Jim Caesar, regional vice president, Opus Design Build, LLC, tells GlobeSt.com. "But their current showcase is not large enough and they want to be able to better interface with their clients." 

"I can see why companies like Google and Motorola want to go downtown," he adds, but by choosing a West Dundee location, the UK-based Renishaw will remain close to both its US employees and the many high-tech manufacturers that line the corridor along the Northwest Tollway. "They want to be near O'Hare, where many of their clients travel from, and the corporate base out there." 

"Their employees tend to be people with kids that live in the suburbs," he says, with not as many of the young software techies that have increasingly chosen an urban lifestyle. "A lot of what they do is servicing equipment and training people." 

Caesar says the growing economy is causing many local high-tech manufacturers to consider expanding or developing new facilities, and Opus is lining up several projects very similar to Renishaw's in the same general area. 

"Most companies that do this type of high-precision manufacturing want to stay in the US where they have access to the best equipment and an educated workforce. They're finding it far more effective than outsourcing the work to cheaper labor pools."

Construction began this month with completion slated for June 2016. Opus Design Build, LLC will be the design-builder and Opus AE Group, LLC will be the architect and engineer of record.