Amgen has sold its sprawling Deerfield office campus for $151 million, striking a sale-leaseback deal that lets the pharmaceutical giant keep a foothold in one building while a Fortune Brands Innovations unit moves into the other two. The three-building complex at 1 Horizon Way, tucked along I-294, sits on 70 acres and totals 660,000 square feet of office space.
The buyer is an entity affiliated with Mesirow, according to The Real Deal, which first reported the transaction. Terms of the leaseback beyond the $151 million purchase price were not disclosed. Fortune Brands Innovations has said it expects to employ up to 1,000 people at the site by 2027, occupying the two buildings Amgen is vacating while Amgen retains space in the third.
A Campus That Has Changed Hands Before
The Deerfield property has a layered ownership history. Horizon Therapeutics purchased the 70-acre site from Takeda Pharmaceuticals for $115 million in 2020, and Amgen's 2023 acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics brought the campus into its own portfolio, per the same reporting from The Real Deal. That means the property has now changed institutional hands at least three times in six years, even as its physical footprint has stayed largely intact.
Mesirow's real estate arm is no stranger to this kind of deal. The subsidiary specializes in sale-leasebacks and has completed more than $8 billion in such transactions over the past three decades, the outlet's report notes. That track record includes a much larger deal outside Illinois: Mesirow Realty Sale-Leaseback Inc., a division of the Chicago-headquartered Mesirow Financial, acquired Verizon's 1.4-million-square-foot operations center in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, for $650 million, with Verizon agreeing to lease the entire facility back for a 20-year term. That New Jersey property employs 3,900 full-time workers.
Part of a Broader Pattern in Corporate Real Estate
Sale-leasebacks have become a familiar move for companies looking to free up cash tied to real estate rather than continue owning it outright. Back in 2013, Kraft Foods Group sold its suburban Chicago headquarters, a 679,000-square-foot property on its own 70-acre campus, to W.P. Carey and agreed to lease the building back for at least 10 years, according to the Los Angeles Times. At the time, Mesirow Financial senior managing director Garry Cohen called sale-leasebacks an “underutilized tool” for companies to “unlock capital they had previously tied up in real estate.”
The Amgen deal also lands amid a challenging stretch for office real estate more broadly. Chicago's office vacancy rate stood at 17.8% in June, according to a CommercialCafe report, with growth in adaptive reuse projects helping keep that figure from climbing further. Nearly 60% of office sales closed in Chicago since 2024 have been discounted, the report found, and roughly 95 million square feet of Chicago office space is now considered suitable for conversion to another use.
Nationally, the office vacancy rate was 17.7% in June, down 170 basis points from a year earlier, per the same CommercialCafe data. Office-to-multifamily conversions completed or under construction nationwide reached 11.8 million square feet in 2025, the report notes, the highest level recorded in any prior year — a sign that owners of aging or underused office stock are increasingly looking for new uses rather than new tenants.
