Westfield Company lands tenants at new industrial campus in Denver

Westfield Company has landed three tenants to take up 159,000 square feet at its new industrial warehouse campus in north Denver.

The locally based developer inked leasing deals with Minnesota-based Total Tool, Illinois-based Crescent Electric Supply and an undisclosed tenant at the 472,800-square-foot Pivot Denver campus at 451 East 58th Avenue, the Denver Business Journal reported.

The $100 million campus, which took two years to complete, includes three industrial warehouses at East 58th and the 25 Freeway, north of Downtown.

It replaces the Denver Mart, a well-known spot for trade shows, gun shows, garden shows, expos and other events dating back to the 1960s. Westfield led its redevelopment after buying the 30.4-acre site in 2021 for an undisclosed price.

“I love and am proud of all of our projects, but It’s hard to deny that this one is truly the single best-located industrial asset in the central Denver submarket,” Matt Mitchell, a partner at Westfield, told the Business Journal. “You’ve got I-70 the next exit south, I-76 the next exit north. You get to Downtown in five minutes. 

“You’ve got frontage and billboard signage on I-25, and, frankly, we have a Denver address, which a lot of tenants like, but we’re in unincorporated Adams County, so they have a meaningful savings in taxes, particularly sales tax,” he said.

Total Tool leased 59,000 square feet late last year. Crescent Electric Supply leased 25,000 square feet for its wholesale and distribution business. A third tenant leased 75,000 square feet, but asked not to be identified until it informed its customers of the move.

Terms of the leases were not disclosed.

Industrial and logistics developments have remade old dairy and grocery distribution centers and other properties in north Denver, and there’s demand for modern logistics buildings.

Industrial leasing in Denver has cooled from an all-time high, but is still hot, said Tyler Smith of Cushman & Wakefield, which is recruiting tenants for Pivot Denver.

In greater Denver last year, tenants leased 1.8 million feet of warehouses, down 21 percent from a record 15 million square feet leased in 2021, but still above the historical average, Smith said. “2021 was so robust that every year after has almost felt like a failure, but it’s not.” 

The old model of finding any “big gray box” with a roof located near the airport has evolved, Mitchell told the newspaper.

“Now industrial and logistics tenants are actually making decisions based on proprietary models of storage costs and driver time and proximity to rooftops,” Mitchell told the Business Journal. 

“It’s gotten so much more sophisticated that certain tenants are finding they can afford to pay an extreme premium in rent compared to the same type of space out by the airport, because of access to labor and how quickly people, their customers, can find them,” he said.

Westfield Company, founded in 1993, has developed or acquired more than 7 million square feet of industrial, office and residential properties, according to its website. In the past 20 years, the firm has raised $550 million in equity and capitalized $1.7 billion in investments.

— Dana Bartholomew

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