Bancroft Capital has former StorageTek campus under contract

LOUISVILLE – California-based real estate investment firm Bancroft Capital has the 432-acre former StorageTek/Sun Microsystems campus in Louisville under contract for about $50 million.

Doug McDonald, a principal at Bancroft in charge of acquisitions, told the Colorado Real Estate Journal that if the deal goes through his firm will pitch the site, through the Denver Metro Economic Development Corp., as a location for Amazon.com Inc.’s second headquarters in North America.

The property in Louisville was owned by Storage Technology Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. before being sold to ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) in 2008 for $55.6 million, where it planned to build a world-class research and training campus focusing on sustainable energy.

ConocoPhillips subsequently spun off Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) into an independent company, which inherited the project but never moved forward although the site has been cleared. In 2012, Phillips 66 paid Conoco $38.1 million as part of the split of assets, according to Boulder County property records.

In June, Phillips 66 entered into an agreement to “sell land in Louisville to a land development company,” according to documents filed in August with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing stated that Phillips 66 is banking on a price of $50 million and expects to close the sale in the first quarter of 2018.

Cities in Colorado are pitching sites to Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) that in September said it plans to invest more than $5 billion in construction and operation of Amazon HQ2.

In addition to Amazon’s direct hiring and investment, construction and operation of Amazon HQ2 is expected to create tens of thousands of jobs in construction and related industries, and generate tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the city where Amazon HQ2 is located.

Amazon has said that Amazon HQ2 will match its headquarters in Seattle that has 33 buildings, 8.1 million square feet of space, 40,000 employees and 24 restaurants and cafes.

Amazon is building a 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center in Aurora near its 452,200-square foot sortation center there, and it is building a three-story, 2.4 million-square-foot fulfillment center in Thornton.