Colorado Real Estate Journal - August 17, 2016
Wal-Mart has acquired just under 169 acres of land next to Denver International Airport for $13.6 million, according to public records. While neither the retailer nor those involved in the transaction would comment, talk among Denver area industrial brokers is that Wal-Mart will build a sizable e-commerce fulfillment center on the property. The site is located within Porteos, a 1,287-acre commercial development adjacent to DIA at Jackson Gap Street and East 64th Avenue. The property has been annexed into the city of Aurora and Wal-Mart’s site is zoned for industrial uses. “While we are always looking for new opportunities to better serve our customers, we have no news to announce in Aurora at this time,” Anne Hatfield, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. Wal-Mart has been expanding its network of e-commerce fulfillment centers to shorten delivery times and improve efficiencies. According to a Wal-Mart video posted online last fall, one of those new centers has five times the SKU (stock keeping unit) storage capacity that Wal-Mart’s entire network had a year before. The centers are being strategically located around the country based on customer demand.