California investor buys Medtronic campus in Gunbarrel

BOULDER — For the second time since late 2020, the Medtronic Inc. campus in Boulder’s Gunbarrel neighborhood has changed hands. 

The seven-building, 453,565-square-foot flex-office campus at 5920 Longbow Drive and nearly eight acres of adjacent undeveloped land were bought last month for $125.5 million, Boulder County property records show. That’s more than triple what the property sold for just over a year ago.

Texas investment group Crescent Real Estate LLC, which bought the campus in December 2020 for $36.5 million through holding company GPIF MT Boulder LLC — the GPIF stands for GP Innovation Funds, a unit formed after the 2016 combination of Crescent Real Estate Holdings and Goff Capital Partners — sold the site to 5920 Boulder LLC, an entity registered to the San Mateo, California address of office and industrial real estate investor SteelWave LLC. 

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SteelWave also owns a large office space in Louisville and others in Greenwood Village and Denver. 

Representatives for Crescent, Steelwave and Medtronic did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon.  

Covidien, a subsidiary of medical-device maker Medtronic, built the $18 million, 63,000-square-foot Gunbarrel research and development center in 2011.

Medtronic relocated two manufacturing lines out of the facility in 2016, according to media reports.

Dublin, Ireland-headquartered Medtronic is in the process of building a new corporate campus in Lafayette.

The company will consolidate some of its Louisville and Gunbarrel business into 400,000 square feet of new office and laboratory space spread across two, five-story buildings. The hope is to begin moving into the new campus by late this year. 

The Boulder-area has become an increasingly attractive market for out-of-state investors looking to scoop up biotechnology facilities. 

Earlier this month Boston-based Beacon Capital Partners LLC bought a 45,345-square-foot space at 2865 and 2885 Wilderness Place in Boulder for just over $18.6 million with the hope that a renovation will attract a long-term tenant in the life-sciences industry. 

“Larger players who are well capitalized and very bullish on life sciences continue to enter our market,” real estate broker Scott Crabtree, who facilitated the Beacon deal, said in a prepared statement this week. 

Last year, Atlanta-based investment firm Invesco Ltd. bought a Pfizer Inc.-occupied (NYSE: PFE) 151,384-square-foot office and lab campus on Boulder’s Walnut Street for $99 million.

Flex-industrial spaces, particularly those that can support bioscience users, are “all the rage right now,” W.W. Reynolds Cos. president Jeff Wingert said last year during a BizWest CEO Roundtable on the commercial real estate sector.