Want to buy an empty bank branch? You have choices.

Crain's Chicago Business reports:

As you do more banking by smartphone, that bank branch you used to visit may soon turn into a restaurant, a day care center or even a condo tower.

After a branch building boom a decade or so ago, banks are closing offices by the thousands as more of their customers bank online. They're leaving behind space ready to be transformed into something else, whether an urban storefront or a free-standing brick building with a drive-thru in the suburbs.

"If the real estate is strong, any number of things can happen to the property," says Kim McGuire, senior vice president in the Chicago office of CBRE.

It's a problem or an opportunity, depending on your perspective, that will be here for a while. Banks operate about 89,300 branches in the United States today, down 8 percent over the past decade, according to Chicago-based real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle. JLL expects an additional 20 percent drop over the next decade.


In the Chicago area, the number of branches dwindled 11 percent between 2010 and 2016, to 2,863, according to JLL. The losses included a former Fifth Third Bank branch in northwest suburban Wheeling. Cafe Zupas, a suburban Salt Lake City-based restaurant chain, recently took over the building, tearing out the drive-thru to create more parking space. In Old Town, a SharpeVision Lasik surgery center now occupies a recently closed Fifth Third branch location at North Avenue and LaSalle Street.

Banks are entrenching amid a broader shakeout in the retail real estate market. Retailers that sell everything from clothes to TVs are closing stores as e-commerce changes consumer shopping habits. Just as more people pay their mortgages and deposit checks by phone, shoppers are spending less time in physical stores.

Demand for retail space is sagging as a result: At 10 percent,​ the Chicago-area retail vacancy rate is down from its post-crash high, but it's also well above its ​ pre-recession low of 7.2 percent in 2006, according to CBRE.

The supply of square footage in the news for you rookies out there.