Warehouse Feasibility Study in Illinois

Cook County and the public-warehouse code

Illinois holds 32 SBA loans for warehouse and distribution from FY2017 to FY2026, worth $34.1 million. The cell's most telling feature is where those loans sit: Cook County accounts for 20 of them, with Lake at 4, DuPage at 3 and Will at 2, and only a few downstate counties such as Bureau, DeKalb and Jefferson appear once each. The state ranks 6 of 46 for the class, but the class itself is a middling 22 of 39 among Illinois asset classes. A location quotient of 1.24x says warehouses are somewhat overrepresented in Illinois lending against the national share.

Loan size in line with the nation

Unlike many small cells, this one is not a story of unusually small checks. The median loan of $539,050 is 1.08x the class median across the country, while the central half of loans spans $191,000 to $1.6 million. That width matters to anyone sizing a project: a modest storage building and a larger distribution facility can both fit inside the range. Program counts are 23 for SBA 7(a) and 9 for SBA 504, and 3.1% of loans are franchises.

Lenders by program

The lender tables separate the programs. Under SBA 7(a), The Huntington National Bank holds 7 loans worth $4.6 million. Under SBA 504, Small Business Growth Corporation leads with 5 loans worth $8.0 million. Per SBA, each loan is listed under whoever holds or held it, so the tables show books and not underwriting. The difference between the two tables is itself informative: dollars per loan run much higher on the 504 side, which fits fixed-asset projects.

Timing and the floors

Annual approvals bounced between 1 loan in FY2024 and 6 in FY2025, so no single year should be treated as a trend. For Illinois warehouses neither the cancellation nor the charge-off rate is published, the cohorts being short of loans, and an unpublished rate is not a zero rate. Lenders reading this page have no state-specific loss floor to cite.

Reading the code correctly

The code covers public warehousing only. Owner-occupied warehouses belonging to other industries, such as a manufacturer's own distribution building, are coded to those industries and are absent here, so this record understates warehouse lending as a physical building type.

Testing an Illinois warehouse project

A study for a warehouse in Illinois should test lease-up or contract demand from named user types, clear height and dock configuration against what tenants in that submarket ask for, and the cost of the shell against a loan likely to sit near the national median. Cook County dominates this record, so a project in Lake, DuPage or Will should show why it can draw the same users at its own rents. Debt service coverage should survive a vacancy period, and the appraisal should be tested for how much of the value rests on a single tenant.