New York developer buys Stanley National building in Rock Falls

ROCK FALLS – A nationally and internationally renowned real estate development company with more than $60 billion in assets bought the former Stanley Black & Decker/National Manufacturing building at 41 U.S. Route 30 for $18.3 million, Lee County property tax records show.

That’s $2.2 million more than a Texas developer paid for the site a little more than a year ago.

According to its website, Related Companies, based in New York City, is a privately held developer and landlord with offices in New York, Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Los Angeles.

What the company plans for the 124-acre site is not yet known; a message left with the New York office early Monday afternoon has not yet been returned.

“We offer properties at the forefront of their respective categories, including luxury condominiums, affordable and workforce housing, bespoke company headquarters, retail hotspots, unconventional hotels and world-class city centers” in “gateway cities around the world,” according to the company’s website.

The site was bought last week under the auspices of 41 US 30 Owner LLC, which incorporated May 26. Its eight managers all are with Related Companies, state records show.

Part of the 652,000-square-foot building is home to Precision Metal Industries, a division of Cimco Recycling, which has been there a little less than four years.

In Chicago, Related Companies, which also has its own construction division, is building The 78, so named because it will be the city’s 78th neighborhood, the company says. It will be its 24th development in Chicago alone.

“Set along a half-mile of riverfront, The 78 is a remarkable 62-acre site that will fuse new homes, commercial enterprises, cultural events, academia and outdoor recreational space into a groundbreaking new neighborhood – one that will challenge how we think about ourselves, and how the world thinks about Chicago,” it says on its website.

“The 78 will bring more than $7 billion of economic activity to the city.”

Related is the fourth owner of the Rock Falls property in four years.

Quad City Metals Investments LLC of Fort Worth, Texas, incorporated in April 2021 and bought former hardware manufacturing plant for $16.1 million from I-88 Distribution Centers LLC.

Dax T.S. Mitchell, founder and principal of MAG Capital Partners, LLC in Fort Worth, owner of Quad City Metals, said at the time that he planned to try to attract businesses and develop the site.

He bought the property from Robinson Investments Ltd. of Bellefontaine, Ohio; it bought the site in September 2018 for $3.8 million and renamed it the I-88 Distribution Center.

Robinson planned to rent out the site, which is about a quarter mile from the interstate, to warehousing, logistics and manufacturing businesses.

PMI was its first tenant, moving in that December. Wahl Clipper Corp. also has space in the building, which was left vacant in 2011, when Stanley Black & Decker announced that its plants in Sterling and Rock Falls would be closed.

Stanley Works bought the National Manufacturing plant in 2005, and the decision to close the plants came in the aftermath of its merger with Black & Decker in 2010.