Former HP Greeley site still in search of buyers

GREELEY – Weld County economic experts were hopeful in the spring of 2003 that a company would come along to occupy the recently vacated Hewlett-Packard Co. building in west Greeley. They knew their biggest challenge was its size. It’s not every day a company wants a 250,000-square-foot building.

Four years later, not much has changed. The building is still empty. The owners, the real estate company listing the property and Weld County’s economic development organization, Upstate Colorado, are still looking for a company to occupy the property.

“We keep fighting that battle and will continue to do so,´ said Bruce Deifik, principal owner of the building and head of the American Nevada Co., a development company headquartered outside Las Vegas. “We continue to search nationally and even internationally for users for what is a beautiful, beautiful building that is just sitting there and has all kinds of potential.”

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HP announced in early 2000 it would vacate the building near 10th Street and 71st Avenue and relocate the employees from there to plants in Loveland and Fort Collins. The move was completed in April 2003.

In September 2004, Deifik, Greeley attorney Jeff Beddingfield and Fort Collins Realtor Rhys Christensen, operating as Boomerang Properties LLC, bought the site for $8 million in cash – $6 million below asking price.

In 2005, the Greeley Planning Commission agreed to change the zoning of the 165-acre parcel from industrial to a combination of commercial and residential. Deifik said he and the other owners are still considering what to do with the 60 acres around the building zoned for residential use.

Interest, but no sale

In four years, various prospects have been interested in the building, including several data and call centers, Christensen said.

Other lookers:

n Washington Mutual, a Fortune 500 financial and banking services corporation, considered the site in June 2003.

n Aims Community College considered relocating to the HP site in 2004, but school officials decided to keep the college in its current Greeley campus.

n In 2005, the building caught the eye of Intel Corp., the world’s largest chip manufacturer and leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. But the company ended up buying the former Celestica building in Fort Collins.

The owners of the building have agreed they could split it up into increments of 30,000 to 120,000 square feet. Breaking a large building up was successful at the former State Farm Insurance site in south Greeley, a 300,000-square-foot building vacated when the company moved to its new headquarters to the Promontory business park in west Greeley. The former site is now the home of several different companies in offices of various sizes.

Larry Burkhardt, president and CEO of Upstate Colorado, said the idea of subdividing the old HP building opens up opportunities for his organization to promote the building. The site is one of the featured properties on Upstate’s new Web site, www.upstatecolorado.org.

“It’s a very difficult proposition to refill a building that size,” Burkhardt said. “I don’t know if it will be easier to fill subdivided, but it certainly opens up more doors for companies to look at it.”

Single tenant ideal

If the building is broken up, the owners would do the partitioning, exits, bathrooms and electrical work. Individual companies would have to complete their own remodeling beyond that, said Christensen, who is listing the property for Realtec in Fort Collins.

Christensen said it would be ideal to find one company to occupy the entire building.

A few weeks ago, a data center looked at the site, the only building the company considered in the entire western United States, Christensen said. But the company was more interested in constructing its own building.

That’s another challenge trying to attract companies big enough to seek a 250,000-square-foot site. The building is equipped with the electrical, fiber-optic and fire-protection capacity for a company using state-of-the-art technology.

“It would cost a company $300 per square foot to construct a building and equip it the way this one is,” Christensen said. “But companies that large still usually want to build their own buildings.”

Despite the four years the building has been empty, Christensen said he’s hopeful someone will come along.

“It’s ideal for education, government or a large manufacturer,” he said. “Greeley lost a big employer when HP left. The city needs this building filled again.”