CHICAGO-In a long-anticipated move, officials from Bank of America and the Howard Hughes Corp. joined Mayor Rahm Emanuel yesterday to announce that the bank would be the anchor tenant of 110 N. Wacker Dr., the latest of several new office towers along the Chicago River that have altered the city's skyline.

The Chicago Plan Commission approved the 51-story trophy office building on March 16, and the developers just needed a signature from the bank, which will occupy more than one third of its 1.35 million square feet, to get the project underway. JLL represented Bank of America on the deal.

Hughes Corp. will collaborate with Riverside Investment & Development, Goettsch Partners and CBRE – the same development, design and leasing team behind the recently completed 150 North Riverside Plaza office tower.

That building was 83% leased when it opened in January, a good illustration of how much demand exists for a new class of office tower, ones that provide far better amenities and design elements than furnished by the CBD's older class A projects. Likewise, Hines opened 444 W. Lake St. in the fourth quarter of last year, and by this winter, tenants were leasing more than 83% of its 1.1 million square feet.

“These are all signs of a big push by companies to gain a significant presence in the downtown, mostly so they can attract and retain top talent,” Ryan McGuire, Chicago-based vice president and corporate business unit leader of Clayco, tells GlobeSt.com. The millennial generation, now the focus of so much attention from corporate recruiters, “wants different things than the other generations want.”

It's not as if suburban office campuses are no longer wanted. Clayco, after all, recently finished developing Zurich North America's $333 million headquarters in suburban Schaumburg. But millennials prefer to live and work in urban environments, which means that Hughes' new project will have a ripple effect in neighborhoods beyond the city's core.

“I think it's going to spur more development,” says McGuire. “People's eyes do open up when a company like Bank of America moves downtown.” Apartment developers, for example, will start calculating exactly where all these arriving employees will live, along with those working at McDonald's, and Google, which decided to put their headquarters in the neighborhoods just west of downtown.

The peripheral neighborhoods will see not just apartments, but “all the different modern conveniences that people want to have and need to have,” including restaurants, grocery stores and other retail. The corporate relocations “drive all of those ancillary demands.”

Charlotte, NC-based Bank of America has thousands of employees located throughout the city and suburbs, and will consolidate several thousand into its new space. Hughes and its partners plan to open 110 N. Wacker by 2020.

The setting between Wacker Dr. and the Chicago River will offer its tenants sweeping views up and down the river, as well as of the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan, Jim McCaffrey, vice president of development for Hughes, told GlobeSt.com back in March, a big draw to office users accustomed to seeing nothing but another office tower out their windows. “There will be nothing but light and air on all four sides.”

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Hughes Secures Anchor Tenant for New Office Tower

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