Two lab-ready buildings at 8025 and 8045 Lamon Avenue inside the Illinois Science + Technology Park in Skokie are up for grabs, in what ranks as one of the largest suburban lab offerings the Chicago area has seen in recent years. The timing is tricky. Leasing momentum for life-sciences space has eased off its post-pandemic surge, so this sale is shaping up as an early test of how much investors still crave turnkey lab portfolios outside the coastal life-science hotbeds.
What’s for sale
JLL is exclusively marketing the two-building portfolio, which totals roughly 287,739 rentable square feet. Marketing materials show 8025 Lamon at about 78 percent occupancy and 8045 Lamon at roughly 53 percent, with more than 100,000 rentable square feet of plug-and-play life-sciences space ready for tenants. The pitch also leans on recent capital improvements, and a reset basis meant to catch the eye of value-focused buyers who think they can ride out a choppy cycle.
Why are owners selling
As reported by Crain's Chicago Business, the decision to list the buildings comes amid a broader cooldown in demand for life-sciences space after several years of rapid new development and intense investor interest. That coverage framed the Skokie move as part of a nationwide reset in which some owners are testing the waters in a tougher financing climate and with slower leasing. The timing puts a spotlight on suburban lab campuses and how they will fare in a post-boom phase.
Market backdrop
Industry research underscores how the sector has been recalibrating. Cushman & Wakefield pegs U.S. lab vacancy at about 23.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, while CBRE Research records a similar 23.2 percent vacancy rate in the first quarter of 2026. Both firms note that new construction has slowed sharply, a shift that should help absorption over time even as pricing resets in the near term. That mix of elevated vacancy and a much smaller development pipeline is giving buyers room to be choosy about where they put their money.
Local history
The Illinois Science + Technology Park occupies the repurposed G.D. Searle campus and now hosts a cluster of testing and R&D companies, according to the Illinois Science + Technology Park. Earlier in the cycle, two Lamon Avenue lab buildings at the park sold for roughly $75 million in 2021, illustrating the boom years for this niche, according to The Real Deal. That track record helps explain why the campus can still draw serious investor attention even as deals elsewhere have slowed.
What buyers will look for
Prospective buyers will be weighing the portfolio’s existing rental income against the upside from filling under-occupied lab floors and the cost of updating older building systems. The promise of large-block, plug-and-play lab space is meant to shorten leasing timelines and attract bigger R&D users that prefer to move in quickly. In today’s market, regional institutions, private equity investors with a longer hold strategy and life-science specialists are the likeliest bidders.
The listing puts Skokie’s role in the Chicago-area life-science ecosystem under the microscope and is expected to provide an early read on pricing and investor appetite for suburban lab campuses. Market watchers will be looking for formal bids and price talk in the coming months as buyers and sellers feel out the new balance between demand and supply.
