Colorado Real Estate Journal - September 21, 2016
With large, rail-served industrial sites increasingly hard to find, Great Western Industrial Park in Windsor is looking to attract more big users – and jobs – to Northern Colorado. Home to companies including Vestas, Carestream Health, Halliburton, Front Range Energy, Schlumberger and others, the 3,000-acre park is able to offer something few industrial parks can: sites from 2 to 200 acres with rail service to both Union Pacific and BNSF railroads. Its affiliation with OmniTRAX, one of the country’s largest railroads, also enables it to assist companies through the entire real estate development, transportation and logistics process. Great Western Industrial Park and OmniTRAX, both owned by the Broe Group, recently teamed up with Newmark Grubb Knight Frank to market the park regionally and nationally. “With the industrial renaissance happening in the U.S., we are seeing an increase in companies that need to move large quantities of their products far distances, and rail has always been the effective way to do that,” said Tony Manos, senior vice president of industrial development for OmniTRAX Inc. “It’s getting extremely difficult to find rail-service properties like the sites at the Great Western Industrial Park,” said Mike Wafer, NGKF executive managing director. “Our hope is that by working together, we can fill the park with more manufacturing and distribution businesses that have been providing economic and job growth throughout the region.” Equidistant from Interstates 80 and 70, the park is just east of I-25 and approximately 40 miles from the metro area. “With two Class 1 railroads, it offers a lot of different distribution avenues,” Wafer commented. Just under 2,000 people currently work for companies within Great Western Industrial Park, which is located within Weld County’s enterprise zone and is a designated foreign trade zone. The park also is within the town of Windsor, which offers a fast-track system for commercial development. According to Tim D’Angelo, NGKF senior managing director, some sites that advertise rail service aren’t necessarily engineered to make service readily available. At Great Western, “When these rail users drill down, they have a rail-ready site,” he said. “Having the rail component can be really complicated and intimidating for users of the rail, and also the brokerage community,” Wafer added. “Our goal is to help make the users more comfortable and educate them on the benefits of our park and having everything under one roof.” Something that sets Great Western Industrial Park apart is, “Rail made easy is a big part of our mission,” said Erik Halverson, OmniTRAX director of land development and acquisitions. “We deal with folks who are going to be coming in and building a new facility who are exceptional in the industries they’re in, but they may need a connection between the real estate side and the railroad. Our operation gets involved from the very beginning of the conversation. We work with their logistics professional to make sure they have the perfect solution.” While the vast majority of companies within Great Western are rail users, the park also has land available for those who don’t require rail. There also may be companies that haven’t considered rail and would benefit from it, in which case, “We want to break the ice and at least help them determine if it is or is not an option,” Halverson said. The park can do land sales, land leases and build-to-suits. Land prices start at $2.95 per square foot. “It could be two or three times higher in the Denver metro area, so we think there is a real value proposition here,” said Wafer. According to Halverson, Great Western has experienced interest from companies new to the park as well as significant “organic” growth from companies like Vestas, which has gone from 700 to more than 1,000 employees.