An Office Campus Just Repriced As A Power Parcel

$2,037,500 per acre — 3.02x the 2023 basis, +$54.5M, roughly a 44.5% compound annual return over three years. About $168.04/sf across the standing office building, which is being valued as a shell, not as office. Brennan's land basis was $675,000 per acre; Digital Realty is paying $2.04M per acre.

The asset that failed as office also failed as warehouse. Brennan bought it out of foreclosure, underwrote a $100M industrial conversion, never broke ground, and tripled its money anyway.

That is not a real estate return. It is an option premium on electricity. Against Digital Realty's own Stickney purchase at $756,303 an acre three weeks earlier, Rolling Meadows priced at 2.69x per acre — for less than a third of the land. The delta is not dirt. It is utility infrastructure: existing service, substation adjacency, and a suburban campus already built to absorb load.

Which reframes what a distressed suburban office campus actually is. Not a building to lease. A serviced, entitled, powered site with a structure on it that may or may not survive.

Implications. Underwriting obsolete suburban office as office is now the error. The relevant diligence is the interconnection queue, substation capacity and the utility's service position — inputs that belong to an energy analyst, not a leasing broker. Owners of powered campuses in data center corridors are holding an asset most of them have not valued correctly.

Uncertainty: no megawatt capacity, building program, broker or lender disclosed. The per-acre comparison to Stickney is a CRE360 derivation, not reported. Hawthorne Race Course is a separate, earlier transaction and should not be bundled with this one.