Animal care products company decamps Greeley for new Centerra HQ

Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected to say that AHI will continue to occupy and use its former space on “O” Street in Greeley as a company office; the new corporate office in Loveland drew employees largely from a second location in downtown Greeley. BizWest regrets the error.

LOVELAND and GREELEY — Animal Health International Inc. has moved its headquarters from Greeley to Loveland, its website and its broker confirmed.

AHI distributes products including pharmaceuticals, software and equipment through veterinarians and retailers. The company’s roots date to the 1940s, its website said, with a Greeley presence since 1972.

For its new headquarters, AHI leased the fourth floor of 2915 Rocky Mountain Ave., a mile from Heska Corp. (Nasdaq: HSKA), which makes and sells animal care products, and two buildings away from the home offices of McWhinney Real Estate Services Inc.

The new digs are about 15,500 square feet, said Ron Kuehl, a partner in Realtec Commercial Real Estate Services of Loveland, who represented AHI. Kuehl said employees vacating space in Greeley occupied about 25,000 square feet.

“They were in an older, downtown bank building” in Greeley, Kuehl said, and spread over several floors. “This is efficient and newer space.”

A spokesperson for AHI’s owner, St. Paul, Minnesota-based Patterson Cos. Inc. (Nasdaq: PDCO), said its employees in Loveland are mostly from a Chase Bank building location in Greeley’s downtown. AHI had its headquarters for many years in a different building on “O” Street in Greeley.

Kuehl said the move came about because of a desire for “significantly upgraded space,” newer workforce practices after the COVID pandemic with more employees working remotely or only sometimes working from an office, and a more central location in Northern Colorado.

The new space in Loveland was vacated by Scotland-based energy consultants Wood Plc and had been marketed as a three-year sublease. Kuehl said AHI wanted a longer-term direct lease with building owners.

Greeley-based BTT LLC bought the four-story, 58,000-square-foot building from McWhinney in 2010 for $14.2 million. Kuehl, a McWhinney vice president at the time, was involved in the sale as well.

Cole Herk of Cushman & Wakefield in Fort Collins was “the guy who made it happen” for BTT, Kuehl said.

Animal Health International

Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, a Northern Colorado doctor of veterinary medicine, Bob Hummel, brought together what became Animal Health International in roughly the first decade of the 2000s. Hummel died in October 2020.

Jim Neufeld, a longtime Greeley resident and broker with Re/Max Commercial Alliance in Loveland who did some work for an AHI predecessor company, said Hummel was brilliant, entrepreneurial and liked a “low-key” approach, including to its headquarters.

“He was a Greeley guy, and we talked several times about their property here,” he said. “Make no mistake — Dr. Hummel is responsible for the [company growth]. As a Greeley guy myself, I’d be disappointed if AHI moved to Loveland.”

AHI was at one time publicly traded on the Nasdaq market under the ticker symbol “AHII” and controlled by Boston-based Charlesbank Capital Partners. When Charlesbank sold its stake in 2011, it had some $700 million revenue annually.

It had about $1.5 billion in annual revenue by 2015, when Patterson Cos. bought it for $1.1 billion. Patterson is a global distributor of dental and animal health products. It had $6 billion in annual revenue in 2020.

AHI has about 50 offices in the U.S. and Canada including Colorado locations in Sterling and La Junta.

© 2021 BizWest Media LLC

on Facebook on LinkedIn