A Los Angeles-based mega-investor has snapped up ten light industrial properties scattered across suburban Chicago for $84 million, adding another chunk of warehouse space to its rapidly growing footprint in the region. The 717,000-square-foot portfolio spans Will, DuPage and Kane counties, with individual buildings ranging from 23,600 square feet up to 237,000 square feet.
Ares Management bought the ten-property package from High Street Logistics Properties, according to property records cited by The Real Deal, working out to roughly $117 per square foot. High Street originally assembled the collection of buildings between 2020 and 2022 for $62 million, meaning the Massachusetts-based firm turned a tidy profit on the resale. The portfolio is already 84 percent leased to 19 tenants and carries an average building age of 25 years, giving Ares a stabilized income stream from day one.
The deal was brokered on High Street's behalf by Kurt Sarbaugh, Ed Halaburt, Trent Agnew, Sean Devaney, Ross Bratcher and Cameron Chandra, the outlet reported. It's the latest in a string of Chicago-area buys for Ares, which has been steadily building out its Midwest logistics holdings even as new speculative construction in the suburbs has slowed to a crawl.
A Familiar Pattern: High Street Builds It Up, Ares Buys It
This isn't the first time High Street has handed off a stabilized suburban Chicago asset to Ares. Ares Management previously acquired the 355 Logistics Center in Lockport back in 2019, a Class A warehouse High Street had brought from just 17 percent occupancy to full occupancy. Earlier this month, Tesla renewed its lease for 308,988 square feet at that same facility, according to High Street Logistics Properties, which was founded in 2002 by former Trammell Crow Company executives and has acquired more than $6 billion in industrial real estate across 526 buildings since its founding.
Ares has also been active elsewhere in Aurora. In December 2025, the firm bought a 356,000-square-foot Aurora warehouse for about $129 per square foot, then followed that up in June 2026 with the purchase of a 263,000-square-foot Aurora logistics center for $58 million, or roughly $220 per square foot. Both the Aurora Logistics Center and the Aurora Warehouse were new developments, per property records cited by The Real Deal.
High Street's playbook of assembling and turning over multi-property packages goes back years. High Street Realty Company acquired an 11-property suburban Chicago industrial portfolio totaling over 1 million square feet for $86 million in March 2018, according to The Real Deal, in a deal that spanned Lake, Cook and Will counties and was 86 percent leased at the time. The firm was also active more recently in DuPage County, acquiring a separate three-building, 537,681-square-foot portfolio there in October 2025 in a deal brokered by JLL Capital Markets, according to JLL Capital Markets.
Tight Vacancy Fuels the Buying Spree
The Chicago industrial market's fundamentals help explain why Ares keeps writing checks in the region. Speculative industrial development in the suburbs fell to just 1.4 million square feet in the first quarter of 2026, a steep drop from the nearly 12 million square feet that entered the market at the peak in the third quarter of 2023, according to JLL data cited by The Real Deal. Meanwhile, industrial leasing activity in Chicago rose 15 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026, per Transwestern figures cited in the same report.
Separately, JLL Research found that Chicago's overall industrial market vacancy fell to 4.5 percent in the second quarter of 2026, with year-to-date net absorption surpassing 12.8 million square feet on strong demand for shallow-bay and logistics facilities. Chicago has long served as a manufacturing hub, and that legacy has left the region with an aging but well-located stock of infill warehouses that institutional buyers are eager to control.
Rent tiering across the region also helps explain why the deal pencils out for Ares. Industrial asking rents across Chicagoland averaged $9.30 per square foot in the second quarter of 2026, according to CBRE, but prime infill space near O'Hare International Airport commanded between $15 and $22 per square foot, compared to under $7 per square foot for bulk space along the I-80/Joliet corridor. The newly acquired portfolio has access to I-80, I-55, I-88 and I-90, according to property records, positioning it squarely within a corridor where 55 percent of all Chicago-area big-box industrial leases over 500,000 square feet have occurred this year, according to Avison Young.
Ares' Broader Buying Power
The Chicago deal is a small piece of a much larger acquisition machine. Ares Management reported total assets under management of $671.3 billion as of June 30, a 17 percent increase year-over-year, according to Investing.com. In March, Fitch Ratings data showed Ares was preparing to close a $650.2 million purchase of a 36-property, 7.3 million-square-foot industrial portfolio spread across 13 states, with the Chicago metro area accounting for the largest share of square footage in that package. Ares also completed a $2.1 billion deal alongside Makarora Management earlier this year to take public industrial landlord Plymouth Industrial REIT private, according to Commercial Property Executive.
On the brokerage side, JLL added a five-person team in June 2026 that included Adam Haefner, Marty Mikaitis, Zeke Rowan, Nick Fazio and Anne McGrath, all of whom formerly worked for Avison Young, according to The Real Deal. The moves underscore how competitive the Chicago industrial brokerage scene has become as institutional capital keeps flowing into the market's warehouses.
