Big Ten Commits Long-Term to Rosemont

CHICAGO—When the Chicago office of Studley was hired by the Big Ten Conference near the end of 2010 to help think through its real estate needs, Executive Managing Director Robert Sevim knew it was a big job. The conference had been in their Park Ridge headquarters at 1500 W. Higgins Rd. for more than 20 years, but had outgrown the small, roughly 25,000-square-foot building, and could have opted for any number of solutions including renovation, expansion, or selling it and renting a new space, or developing a new headquarters from scratch.

“They didn't necessarily have all the answers,” Sevim says, but during a six-month strategic planning process, “we looked at every possible solution.” And although many companies have recently decided to leave the suburbs and settle downtown, for the Big Ten this possibility was dismissed rather early.

“There are solutions that satisfy your real estate needs, and there are solutions that satisfy your hiring needs,” he explains. Google and others that have chosen to relocate downtown want to attract a younger set of employees, but the Big Ten was not specifically looking for young, tech talent that it needed to satisfy by providing an urban lifestyle.

In fact, the more they studied it, the more the decades-old decision to set up shop in the area made sense. “For them, having access to hotels and access to the airport is key,” Sevim says, since officials from the Big Ten's 14 schools constantly stream in for meetings, and usually need to leave quickly. Therefore, although Studley began studying the various possibilities within a large radius, it quickly shrank down to what properties were available in the Rosemont, Park Ridge, Des Plaines and O'Hare areas.

But that presented another problem. “For their size requirement, there was nothing that presented an opportunity to just go in and open up shop.” Conference officials had decided that the organization needed about 50,000-square-feet of space, or about double the size of the old headquarters, and “most of the buildings in that size range in Rosemont are already occupied,” frequently by an owner committed to the space.

Renting was another possibility. “We looked at that very carefully, but it always ended up coming second as a solution.” As a longtime owner/occupier of their headquarters, becoming a tenant in another building was “not in their DNA.”

Furthermore, this move was meant to largely solve their needs for another 20 years. “The Big Ten is not in the business of real estate,” says Sevim, so “this needed to be done right and it needed to be done once.”

In the end, the conference opted to sell the old headquarters and develop a customized facility that met their size needs. The move to 5420 Park St. in Rosemont's MB Financial Park will allow it to handle the upcoming addition of Rutgers University and the University of Maryland to the conference, and also expand its lineup to include sports like hockey and lacrosse.

And since the building overlooks I-294 and sits near the newly opened Fashion Outlets of Chicago, as well as several existing hotels and restaurants, the conference plans to increase their brand visibility, moves that should help bring visitors to a new museum, set to open in the first quarter of next year, devoted to Big Ten sports.

Between getting the Village of Rosemont on board, and securing the participation of Fogo de Chao, a Brazilian steakhouse that will occupy part of the building, among others, there was “more than the usual number of constituents that needed to be brought on to make it happen,” says Sevim. However, one of the rewards for all of this work came just last week, when the Big Ten Conference headquarters was chosen by NAIOP-Chicago as its office development of the year.