Paul Wisniewski spent years working in the Sears Tower, where he enjoyed a great view of the city from an office on the 93rd floor. On Friday, he was back in his old offices, talking with former co-workers.
One thing that never came up: the allegation that the tower was the target of a terrorist plot.
“We didn’t even talk about it,” said Wisniewski, who works in a nearby office in the tower’s shadow.
Office workers and tenants are shrugging off Thursday’s arrests of seven suspected would-be terrorists from Miami who allegedly discussed an attack on the Sears Tower. Unlike the aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which led to a dearth of leasing for several years at the Sears Tower and other high-rise buildings, few commercial real estate experts are predicting this week’s scare will prompt firms to head for the exits.
“I was in New York during 9/11, oddly enough, so nothing really scares me,” said Gary Elstein, who works on the tower’s 11th floor at software company SPSS Inc. “It’s not like I’m not going to work.”
News of the alleged plot, though, comes at a critical time for the owners of North America’s tallest building. Only recently has the 110-story tower experienced a rebound of sorts after watching nearly a quarter of its 3.8 million square feet of space go on the market at its post-Sept. 11 peak in 2005. However, its vacancy rate has been falling through this year.
Just prior to the attacks in 2001, the tower’s vacancy rate was 5 percent.
Some say that the threat, however minimal, is not healthy for the city’s downtown real estate market. Sofia Dermisi, a real estate professor at Roosevelt University who has studied office market conditions before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, said some people simply no longer want to be high up in a prominent building.
There are multiple factors for Chicago’s relatively high office-vacancy rate when compared with other large cities, she said, “but a key issue is some people can get really scared fairly easily. Considering that Chicago has the tallest building in the U.S., that doesn’t help the downtown area.”
But on Friday, few were predicting an immediate fallout.
“I don’t think that people woke up this morning and said, `Oh boy, I can’t do business in downtown Chicago,'” said John Goodman, executive vice president and branch manager of the Chicago office of Julian J. Studley Inc., a national real estate firm that specializes in tenant representation.
So-called trophy buildings such as Sears Tower, Aon Center or the John Hancock Center “have certainly struggled since Sept. 11, but even those buildings are getting some [leasing] momentum going,” Goodman said.
And security has not been a concern for buyers who want a home in Chicago’s newest planned skyscraper.
“If anything, they want to know how high can I go,” said Tere Proctor, director of sales for Trump International Hotel and Tower. “They want to know the highest floor they can get. They ask us that all the time.”
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