With a major tenant settled in, a high-image office building in the Denver Tech Center found a new owner for $40.5 million.
Mountain View, California-based Rees Properties Inc. bought 8181 E. Tufts Ave. from Westcore Properties, which has a long history with the 185,256-square foot asset and will continue to manage it.
“It was a little bittersweet to sell it. The Westcore team had worked on that building since 2001, when we were employees of MackCali, which was the original developer,” said John Fefley, Westcore senior director in Denver. “The building performed very well.”
Jenny Knowlton
“It’s a really nice building for the north tech center,” said Jenny Knowlton of the Winn Richey Team at CBRE. “It has a granite exterior. It has all subterranean parking, which is really rare for the tech center.”
The six-story building, with a two-story atrium lobby, achieves “fairly high rental rates” and represents newer construction for the tech center, where most of the office product was constructed in the mid-1980s, Knowlton added.
CBRE took the building to market last fall after Westcore and its capital partner, American Realty Advisors, welcomed accounting firm EKS&H for about 82 percent of the space. EKS&H subleased space from Aecom, which had several years remaining on its lease, and also signed a direct lease for an additional floor.
“Once we completed that, the building became 91 percent leased, and Westcore, along with our financial partner, decided it was time to sell the building. We thought we would get strong investor interest due to the long-term nature of the EKS&H lease,” Fefley said.
The 8181 E. Tufts offering received “really strong activity,” according to Knowlton, who represented the seller with CBRE’s Mike Winn, Tim Richey and Chad Flynn. “It definitely got a lot of interest from institutional investors,” she said.
The building was under contract for several months, with the closing scheduled to coincide with completion of EKS&H’s build-out and its occupancy.
Knowlton said Westcore and American Realty “took really good care” of 8181 E. Tufts.
Westcore Properties will look for other Denver assets to redeploy capital from the sale. “We’ll probably focus more on industrial, but always keep our eye out for opportunistic office opportunities,” Fefley said.
