Boston investor scoops up Wilderness Place real estate, eyes biotech tenant

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect that the Crabtree Team is the name of the brokerage involved in the sale.

BOULDER — For the second time in as many years, a pair of east Boulder office buildings have been purchased with the hope that a renovation will attract a long-term tenant in the life sciences industry. 

Boston-based Beacon Capital Partners LLC, through holding company BCSP Wilderness Property LLC, bought the 45,345-square-foot space at 2865 and 2885 Wilderness Place for just over $18.6 million, Boulder County real estate records show.

Boulder’s Element Properties LLC, one of the key developers of the nearby S’Park mixed-use project, bought the buildings in late 2020 from Scout Properties LLC for $11.2 million with a similar plan of attracting a prominent biotech tenant. 

“We purchased the asset in 2020 at a time of uncertainty with the intention of waiting out the pandemic for office demand to recover and then holding long-term,” Element co-founder Scott Holton said in a news release from the Crabtree Team at the Colorado Group Inc., the brokerage that  represented the seller in the off-market acquisition deal. “However, Boulder’s emerging life science market created a new and different opportunity for us that required us to take a fresh look at how to capture that value. The result was the early sale to Beacon.”

The new owner “plans to renovate the property for life sciences and offer it for long-term lease in Boulder’s supply-constrained market,” according to the Crabtree Team.

“Larger players who are well capitalized and very bullish on life sciences continue to enter our market,” broker Scott Crabtree said in a statement. “But it was an honor to work with Beacon, which operates with utmost professionalism as well as Element, which has outstanding knowledge of the local market.”

Beacon is no stranger to the local commercial real estate market having made a splash with the $190-million purchase of the Pearl East Business Park, a 485,000-square-foot campus that’s changed hands a number of times in the past decade. 

The investor also bought The Circa office building at 1615 Platte St. in Denver last year for $60 million, according to a BusinessDen report. 

Wilderness Place has become a hotspot for commercial real estate investors.

The Boulder Beer Co. brewpub space at 2880 Wilderness Place, which closed about two years ago, was sold last year by the brewery’s founders. 

Founders Gina and Frank Day, through holding company 2880 Wilderness Inc., offloaded the roughly 19,000-square-foot building to Iron 26 LLC for $4.25 million.

Iron 26 is an affiliate of Denver-based NexCore Group, a medical office real estate developer.

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