Colorado Real Estate Journal - September 2, 2015
Finding office space in downtown Boulder is hard enough, but large blocks are becoming nearly nonexistent. With SolidFire leasing 62,000 square feet at PearlWest, only one large space currently is available downtown, and only one more will be delivered in near future, according to Alex Hammerstein of CBRE’s Tech and Media Practice Group. Those are Uber’s 33,481 sf at 1900 15th St. and the Wencel Building, a 60,000- sf building at 1900 13th St. that W.W. Reynolds will deliver in mid-2016. The space that SolidFire leased for its corporate headquarters – part of a LEED Platinum mixed-use building scheduled for delivery at 1048 Pearl St. next April – was the largest contiguous block available and the only one that would accommodate the company’s requirement. “With our downtown Boulder commitment, PearlWest was the only current option to have the team together,” said SolidFire spokeswoman Lara Vacante. Hammerstein, along with CBRE’s Marty Knape and Wade Wimmer, represented SolidFire in the lease transaction. “With the new lease that is out for signature following the SolidFire signing, we will have no office space left at PearlWest. We are now working on retail leases and expect to be 100 percent by next spring, when the project opens,” said Lynda Gibbons of Gibbons-White Inc. Gibbons is working with the Nichols Partnership on the four-story PearlWest development at 11th and Pearl streets, which will include a rooftop restaurant, space for an art film theater, public plazas and a robotic, below-grade parking system.
SolidFire, a market leader in all-flash storage system for the Next Generation Data Center, has 50 employees in Boulder and another 150 in regional offices around the world. “With a 46 percent employee growth rate by the end of 2015 alone, SolidFire is looking forward to having all our Colorado-based employees under one roof with enough breathing room to continue expanding our team and meeting the ever-increasing worldwide demand for SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage platform,” SolidFire founder and CEO Dave Wright said in a press release. According to CBRE, downtown Boulder’s office vacancy rate was 5.3 percent at the end of the second quarter, compared with 6.5 percent for the Boulder submarket as a whole and 12.5 percent for metro Denver. That’s up from a low 2.6 percent in the first quarter. Direct lease rates in downtown Boulder averaged $39.30 per sf full service gross, with Class A rates averaging $42.13 per sf.