Graduation is over.
Now it’s time to get serious about a sale.
In the fall, Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights announced that after the school year, the college will close.
The property was put on the market April 9 through the nationally run CBRE real estate company.
CBRE officials said they are not allowed to discuss details on potential interested buyers.
The company does, however, think it has a great property to sell.
“The southwest suburbs of Chicago are a well-established, high-barrier-to-entry market,” CBRE Midwest Regional Manager Anne Rahm said in a news release.
“An opportunity to acquire a fully improved site of this scale with existing utilities, parking, and structures already in place is truly unique. Whether a buyer pursues a continued institutional use or a full repositioning, the existing infrastructure and building quality meaningfully reduce the cost and timeline to execution.”
According to CBRE, the property was originally developed as a golf course and purchased by Trinity Christian College in the 1950s and includes the original clubhouse structure.
The campus includes 22 buildings totaling 467,019 square feet on a contiguous site.
The site included the 71,911-square-foot DeVos Athletics and Recreation Center, which underwent a major expansion in 2012, the Martin and Janet Ozinga Chapel, a 39,780-square-foot assembly building with a 1,200-seat auditorium and pipe organ, and four residence halls totaling 148,819 square feet and 590 beds.
The campus also contains the 37,351-square-foot Heritage Science Center, the Jennie Huizenga Memorial Library, an Art and Communication Center completed in 2009, a dining hall with seating for 350, science laboratories, and administrative offices.
Buildings on the campus were constructed between 1928 and 2009, with capital improvements completed throughout that period. The property includes 928 on-site parking stalls along with existing internal roadways, utilities, and stormwater infrastructure.
Not far from the campus, located at 6601 W. College Dr., is the Schaaf Athletic Complex made up of baseball, softball and soccer fields that may pique the interest of Chicago Christian and Shepard high schools.
Palos Heights officials are interested in seeing how this all plays out. Mayor Bob Straz said he is not allowed to get into any specifics about potential buyers, and he added there will be options for the campus.
“There is some interest,” Straz said. “It’s going to come down to whether they sell it altogether or sell it piecemeal. That will be a major decision once they start getting some bids.”
He recently took a tour of the campus and aside from buildings, there is public works equipment, ATVs, restaurant equipment, books, shelves, science-lab equipment and an expensive organ among many other items.
“Sometimes they have auctions for the equipment itself,” Straz said. “You think about the brick and mortar, but there is a lot of physical equipment there.
“When my college (St. Joseph in Indiana) closed, they auctioned off stuff individually – even the mixers in the kitchen. People come and buy all of that stuff.”