Are we overbuilt?

Analysts warn of glut

By year’s end, a national video-rental chain will build 20 more stores in Northern Colorado and Southern Wyoming.
At least three retail centers will be added in Fort Collins by 1997.
About 40 businesses emerged in six years along the south side of Del Range Boulevard near Cheyenne’s Frontier Mall – a space that was vacant in 1990, according to Debbie Tamlin, president of the ZTI Group, a Fort Collins real estate company.
Retailers’ interest in the area is high. But is it too much too soon?
Some say yes. Expect a flooded retail market if even 50 percent of the proposed retail projects in Fort Collins are built in the upcoming year, said David Veldman, president of Veldman Morgan Commercial in Fort Collins.
Tamlin, whose company leases retail space in Fort Collins, Greeley and Cheyenne, Wyo., says no. Retailers study population growth carefully. They wouldn’t build if they didn’t expect to succceed, she says.
But Ed Stoner of Poudre Property Services in Fort Collins says history has shown that, in Fort Collins at least, “we always overbuild. People will always say, ‘I’ll get in before the others.'”
The competition between the University Park Holiday Inn and the Fort Collins Marriott hotel/convention centers in the late ’80s is an example, he says. They “finally opened in the same month, and it hurt them both for a few years.”
What’s certain is that a few different company officials in Fort Collins are looking warily at a rising number of submissions to the city’s planning department for retail construction. The situation is different in cities such as Loveland and Greeley, where some say retail development is falling short of the demands of healthy population growth.
Loveland and Greeley’s retail vacancies are holding steady at 5 percent, according to Realtec Commercial Real Estate Services Inc. In Fort Collins, the percentage of vacant space shifted from 7.9 percent in August to 10.5 percent ……ÿ