Crescent reenters Boulder office market after $625M 2022 Flatiron Park portfolio sale

BOULDER — Crescent Real Estate LLC, a commercial real estate investor and developer that unloaded its Flatiron Park business campus portfolio in Boulder last year in a record-setting $625 million deal, has returned to the Boulder office market with the acquisition of 16 properties spread across three business parks. 

The acquired properties, located in the HighPoint Business Park, Flatiron Park North and Tierra Business Centre, total nearly 562,000 square feet, Crescent senior vice president Ben Molk told BizWest.

“We have a lot of institutional knowledge about the Boulder market,” Molk said. “We’ve always been huge fans of the Boulder market — we know there’s a lot of opportunity up there.”

While Crescent, which has offices in Denver and Fort Worth, Texas, sold off nearly all of its Boulder assets — with the exception of a small parcel in Gunbarrel — to BioMed Realty LLC in an April 2023 deal that was the largest single real estate transaction in Colorado history, “we never really left the market in terms of involvement,” Molk said. “We’ve stayed active with the Chamber” and with other business and community groups. 

BioMed bought Crescent’s roughly 1,000,000-square-foot, 22-building campus in Flatiron Park with the intent of attracting life-sciences users to flex spaces with research and development laboratories in addition to offices. 

Crescent has a similar user type in mind for its new portfolio, which Molk said includes “very similar assets” as the company sold to BioMed. 

“It will compete directly with those life-science spaces,” he said, referring to other Boulder business campuses that specifically cater to biotechnology tenants. “A lot of the space (in the recently acquired portfolio) is really well suited for that.”

Crescent did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, nor did the company provide specific addresses for the assets it bought. A representative with Unico declined to comment, and deeds relating to the acquisition have yet to appear on Boulder County’s real estate records search portal. 

Within the Tierra Business Centre, which is generally in the area of the 4700 block of Walnut Street and is home to tenants such as PickNik Robotics Inc. and marketing agency Pivot Communication LLC, Molk said Crescent now owns 206,000 square feet.

At Flatiron Park North, located on the 2500 block of 55th Street and home to tenants such as Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Atom Computing, Crescent took over 169,000 square feet, he said.

In the HighPoint campus, which sits on the 5400 block of Airport Boulevard and hosts tenants such as solar-energy monitoring company AlsoEnergy Inc. and Scaled Agile Inc., the investor bought 185,000 square feet, according to Molk. 

Dean Callan & Co. will handle leasing duties at the new portfolio. The Boulder-based brokerage was also Crescent’s leasing partner when the company owned its Flatiron Park portfolio.

“We’re hiring the Boulder people who we’ve worked with historically,” Molk said. “This is the same group that we had a lot of success with in Flatiron Park.”

The portfolio’s occupancy rate is in the “mid-70s,” he said. “There is vacancy in the asset that we’re going to be leasing up. It’s not a stabilized asset, so there’s work to do there.”

While the office real estate submarket has struggled both locally and nationwide, Crescent, Molk said, is betting that the Boulder market, with its relatively high concentration of technology, R&D and advanced manufacturing jobs that can’t easily be done from home, “is different than a traditional office market.”

The company, he said, “believe(s) that high-quality office is going to continue to be something that people need.”