Unico buys 1.5M square feet of Boulder, Fort Collins office space

Seattle-based real estate investment company Unico Properties LLC has purchased a 1.5 million-square-foot portfolio of commercial office properties in Boulder and Fort Collins from Boulder-based W.W. Reynolds Cos.

Ned Carner, Unico’s vice president of acquisitions, in a phone interview Friday declined to disclose the sale price.

But according to Boulder County property records, various affiliates of Unico paid $168,028,720 in a series of 13 transactions recorded Thursday for properties in Boulder. Sales price information on the Fort Collins properties wasn’t immediately available Friday.

The Boulder portfolio consists of 27 buildings and 1,013,443 square feet in four different office parks – the Pearl East Business Park, Tierra Business Centre, Flatirons Business Center and Highpoint Business Park. All four parks are located in East Boulder, and the deal included none of Reynolds’ holdings in downtown Boulder.

The Fort Collins portfolio included 507,005 square feet in 24 properties located in the Prospect East Business Park, southeast of the intersection of E. Prospect Road and S. Timberline Road. That park most notably includes the 115,000-square-foot headquarters of Advanced Energy (Nasdaq: AEIS).

Unico in 2012 bought a majority stake in a portfolio of 14 downtown Boulder buildings owned by J. Nold Midyette that amounts to 354,000 square feet on or around the Pearl Street Mall. Carner said Unico now owns about 13 million square feet of commercial property in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah and Texas, including about 2 million square feet in Denver.

“We feel fortunate to have uncovered the opportunity to invest in this extraordinary portfolio,” Carner said. “This was a very large and complicated transaction that required significant creativity and ingenuity.”

All five of the office parks purchased were developed by W.W. Reynolds Cos. during the 1980s and 1990s, Carner said. W.W. Reynolds Cos. will continue to manage and lease the properties.

W.W. Reynolds Cos. officials could not be reached Friday afternoon. But founder and president Bill Reynolds did issue a statement through Unico.

“Timing and strength of the real estate market in Boulder and Fort Collins made this opportunity to sell a portion of my portfolio possible,” Reynolds said in the statement. “Having personally developed all of the properties included in this sale, it was important to me that my company stay involved going forward. … Unico has a great reputation and the capital necessary to take these buildings through their next evolution.”

Carner said the plan for all of the properties is to upgrade and modernize the buildings, invest in the common areas, and enhance the amenities at the parks.

The Boulder portfolio is 90 percent leased, while the business park in Fort Collins is 95 percent leased. Triple-net lease rates at the Boulder properties, Carner said, are in the mid to high teens per square foot, while the Fort Collins properties lease in the low to mid teens.

Tenants in the Boulder properties include surging tech companies LogRhythm and Tendril Networks, both of whom closed major funding rounds last year.

The four parks in Boulder are all east of Foothills Parkway. Pearl East Business Park sits near the intersection of Foothills Parkway and Pearl Parkway, and Tierra Business Centre is just south of that park. The Flatirons Business Center lies within Flatiron Park off of 55th Street. And Highpoint Business Park is near the Boulder Municipal Airport.

Unico purchased the Boulder portfolio in partnership with global real estate investment advisor AEW Capital Management LP. AEW bought the property on behalf of one of its seven real estate funds.

on Facebook on LinkedIn