The City office of Knight Frank has been appointed to seek buyers for America’s tallest office building.
The agent, and its New York partner Newmark, has been instructed to sell the iconic 1,500 ft Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois, for $1.5bn (£912m).
The building, formerly known as the Sears Tower, is being sold by a consortium of investors including Chicago-based American Landmark Properties and New York developers Joseph Moinian and Joseph Chetrit.
The consortium paid around $900m for the 4m sq ft office block in 2004. It is understood to have some $780m of debt secured against it.
They have tasked the London office with the sales instruction on the back of its recent successes in securing cash-rich overseas buyers for trophy assets including the Aviva tower, EC3, which was bought by Malaysia’s richest family, the Kuoks, for £290m.
KF is likely to take the opportunity to buy the world’s third tallest property to investors including the Kuoks, Chinese Estates, the Kuwait Investment Authority and Norges Bank Investment Management, among others.
A source said: “There will be a big domestic market for this type of product, but there is an even bigger international market for it and the owners know that if you want to get to the type of buyer that does deals of this size, then you have to come to London.”
The 110-storey Willis Tower is expected to attracted a wide variety of interest due to its diverse range of income. Around a third of the revenue from the building comes from non-office income. More than 1.5m tourists visit the tower a year, paying around $17 to visit its skydeck. And, as the country’s tallest property, every major US TV channel has its mast on the building, providing a large and long-term income.
Around 250,000 sq ft of the 1970s-built building is occupied by shops and planning is in place to build a 500-bedroom hotel on an adjacent site. Office occupiers, include the Willis Group, Chubb Group and United Airlines, which has its 650,000 sq ft HQ in the building. Around 20% of the tower is vacant.
KF declined to comment.
