Empty Greeley HP campus could land user soon

GREELEY — Owners of the long-vacant Hewlett-Packard campus in Greeley are working on gaining city approvals for a self-storage facility on 5 vacant acres at the sprawling site. But a representative said this week that the group is also hoping to finalize a deal on a user for the old HP building within the next couple of months.

Andy Klein of Westside Investment Partners Inc. in Greenwood Village said he couldn’t divulge who the potential building user might be and didn’t specify whether the user would take up all or a portion of the 355,000 square feet of office and industrial space.

He said his firm is working on selling different parts of the overall property — which sits just northeast of the intersection of 71st Avenue and 10th Street — to different parties. In all, the property includes the building on a 45-acre parcel, another 79-acre parcel wrapping around the east and north sides of that parcel, and an 11-acre strip on the south side of the building campus.

HP — which opened the campus in 1984 and employed hundreds of people there over the years, mostly in its printer products division — gradually vacated the site in the early 2000s, completely leaving in 2003. HP sold the property and land to a group of Northern Colorado investors in 2004 for $8 million. Westside, along with Greeley investor Brian Bartels, bought the property in late 2007 for $8.36 million. Then the recession hit, bringing with it what Klein termed five years of “economic misery.”

“Right as the world started to get better last year, the oil prices fell apart, and that didn’t help us either,” Klein said, noting the impact of the energy industry in Greeley.

Klein said his group has had various potential deals for the site in the past that fell through or never came to fruition. A few years ago, the owners did sell a 12-acre portion along 10th Street to Banner Health. Four of six small retail pad sites along 10th Street have also sold in recent years to Bank of Colorado, McDonald’s, a car wash and a Les Schwab tire center.

The proposed storage facility would include 80,000 square feet of space just north of the retail pads on the east side of 71st Avenue.

The HP buildings and surrounding land, meanwhile, could be suitable for “any number” of uses, Klein said. He said the ownership group has been willing to sell or lease the site.

“It was built with a lot of power and clearance,” Klein said. “It could be manufacturing, a call center, data center.”

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