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@properties moving lead office to River West

The biggest locally owned residential real estate firm in Chicago plans to move this month out of the main office its founding partners opened on Fulton Street more than 16 years ago.

@properties will retain the space it has in the Fulton Street loft building but shift the base of operations this month to a new facility on Peoria Street in River West, said Thad Wong and Mike Golden, who founded the firm in 2000.

Combining the staff and agents in two existing offices, the new 16,000-square-foot office will open as the largest-by-volume residential real estate office in Illinois, they told Crain’s. More than 320 agents who formerly used the firm’s offices on Fulton and another one on Clybourn will work out of the Peoria Street space, and the firm expects that figure to grow to 400 within a few years, Golden said. The firm has about 2,100 agents, Wong said.

@properties did more than $7.3 billion in local sales volume in 2015, ranking it second only to the Chicago operation of the national brand Coldwell Banker, which did $8.9 billion in local volume. Figures for 2016 will be out later this spring.

The building is approx 27,405 square feet. The space @properties will occupy had already been rehabbed for another company’s offices, Golden said, so fitting it out for the real estate firm is a short process. Staff will start moving in April 15, he said.

A key reason for the move is parking, both partners said. When they opened the office on Fulton Street in 2001, the area was not as hot as it has since become, and on-street parking “was always easy,” Wong said. The new location has its own lot that accommodates about 55 cars. (Those hundreds of agents won’t be vying for the spaces all the time; most real estate agents spend little time in the office.)

While both partners will be housed in the new office, Golden said it won’t be the firm’s headquarters, which is on Ohio Street in Streeterville.

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