Colorado Real Estate Journal - February 1, 2017
Triumph Real Estate Corp. has leased up a high-profile, 18-acre industrial infill site and is putting the last piece of the puzzle into place. Triumph recently signed a 98,140-square-foot lease with Bison Innovative Products at Denver Urban Business Center, the former Sears Outlet property along West Sixth Avenue at 701 Osage St. in Denver. Bison and Quality Electric Distribution, which took a 58,185-sf end cap, are filling the last two spaces in the 330,000-sf former Sears warehouse, which was built starting in 1954 and renovated to attract new tenants. HD Supply/White Cap and Ryder Integrated Logistics are the other warehouse tenants. The property also includes a 40,000-sf industrial building that Sears Outlet occupies. Denver Urban Business Center’s last phase will include new signage to give tenants as much visibility as the city will allow and replacing the Sears Outlet building to increase parking and the size of the truck court. Triumph is exploring numerous build-to-suit options for the relocated building, which will be on the easternmost side of the site. “We always approached this project as a two-phase situation,” said Paul Ruff, Triumph Real Estate Corp. founder and president. Job No. 1 was to lease up the 330,000-square-foot building,” he said, adding that entailed replacing mechanical and electrical systems, dock doors and levelers, adding new entries, and completing environmental remediation, roof work and more. “We’re excited to have this leased and be ready to move on to the final phase of development. Within a short period of time, it’s going to be a really cool business park,” Ruff said. The property’s reinvention is right on target. Triumph Real Estate and Arc Capital Partners acquired the site in April 2014. “We started out with a three-year business plan. We closed on April 23, 2014, and the last tenant will be in in May 2017,” said Ruff. Denver’s central industrial submarket caters mostly to smaller tenants. “We were introducing something to the market that was fairly rare, which was large-bay distribution space,” said Ruff. “The market proved it had demand for that, and obviously the location was the No. 1 attraction,” he said, adding Denver Urban Business Center is a classic last-mile delivery location in the supply chain. Companies that don’t need long-term storage don’t need high ceilings, so DUBC’s tenants were fine with 16- to 21-foot ceiling heights. Because the warehouse was built in phases, it also offered natural demising walls. Colliers International brokers T.J. Smith and David Hazlett represented the landlord in the leases to Bison Innovative Products and QED. Steve Serenyi, also of Colliers, represented Bison. Peter Beugg of JLL represented QED. Mitch Zatz, Beugg and Tyler Reed, also of JLL, represented the landlord in the HD Supply and Ryder leases. Alec Rhodes and Tyler Smith of Cushman & Wakefield represented HD Supply, and Mike Camp of CBRE represented Ryder Integrated Logistics. Denver-based Triumph Real Estate, which helps industrial tenants meet regional distribution and last-mile delivery needs, is a full-service commercial real estate company with properties in Denver and Charlotte, North Carolina. It currently is pursuing additional deals in Denver, Kansas City and Dallas.