Colorado Real Estate Journal - September 21, 2016
DCT Industrial Trust’s newest deal is a first for the Denver based company. DCT owns nearly 2 million square feet of industrial product in the market but has never built a building here. “This is our first development in Denver,” Mark Bowen, DCT Industrial Trust senior vice president, said of DCT Summit Distribution Center. “The reason we like this site so much is what we are planning to develop here is kind of the bread-and-butter of Denver.” DCT Summit Distribution Center is a Class A, 168,000-square foot front-loading distribution building that will be located at East 40th Avenue and Salida Street in Gateway Park in Aurora. Although there have been several large industrial buildings built for large industrial tenants coming to Denver, “There hasn’t been a lot of development, until recently, that can accommodate the smaller users,” said Bowen. Slated to break ground in first quarter 2017, the state-of-the-art building will house one or two tenants. In addition to 32-foot ceiling clearance and ESFR fire protection, it will have a large trailer court with excess trailer parking, which Bowen said is “unheard of” in this market. Ware Malcomb is the architect. The largest industrial real estate investment trust focused on North America, DCT has a portfolio of approximately 72 million sf and is developing in markets across the country. It pursued development sites in Denver for more than three years before assembling the three parcels that comprise the 14.6-acre DCT Summit site. “Our focus is doing the right deals, not necessarily a lot of deals,” said Bowen. “We want to do deals that are natural, that make sense for our portfolio.” For DCT Industrial Trust, that means being close to the urban core. “That’s our focus in all of our markets, including Denver,” said Melissa Sachs, vice president of corporate communications and investor relations. “Denver’s thriving economy and population growth have created one of the strongest distribution markets in the country, creating a greater need for more well-located, state-of-the-art distribution buildings,” said Bowen. “DCT Summit Distribution Center is perfectly located to address this need and is being developed the satisfy the requirements of today’s sophisticated tenant.” Asking rates for space in the building will be in the high $5s per sf triple net. Construction will take approximately seven months.