Sears Sells Headquarters In Hoffman Estates: Report

HOFFMAN ESTATES, IL — It appears there is a buyer of the 273-acre Sears corporate campus on Beverly Road. Compass Datacenters, a Dallas-based data center developer, has agreed to pay for the property, but financial details of how much the purchase was for have not been released, reports Crain's Chicago Business.

Transformco, the parent company of Sears, closed its last store in Illinois two years ago. Since then, it has been attempting to sell the corporate campus and surrounding acres. The corporate division of the department store chain has called 3333 Beverly Road home since 1992. The Sears property also includes a number of low-rise office buildings, totaling 2.4 million square feet.

Patch has reached out to Transformco for this story.

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Sears, founded in Chicago in 1892, was the largest retailer in the United States through the 1980s. In recent years, most of the retail store locations have closed since the former parent company, Sears Holdings, filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Transformco began acquiring parts of that company the following year.

In the last 17 years, Sears and Kmart, which is also owned by Transformco, have closed more than 3,500 stores.

RELATED: Sears Closing Last Department Store In Illinois

Crain's is reporting that if the sales goes through, Compass would likely knock down Sears' 2.3 million-square-foot headquarters building, along with much of the rest of the site. The company would then redevelop the property with warehouse-like structures "for house servers and other computer gear." The data center development could bring in billions of dollars, according to Crain's.

The move continues a trend of companies downsizing or closing corporate headquarters throughout the area since the pandemic, including Allstate in Northbrook and Walgreens in Deerfield.