Rose Medical Center bids for adjacent former VA hospital property

Editor’s note: This report first appeared with BizWest news partner BusinessDen.

DENVER — Rose Medical Center would like to purchase a portion of the former VA hospital campus in Denver.

A spokeswoman for Denver-based HealthOne, the health care system that owns Rose, confirmed to BusinessDen Tuesday that the company had submitted a bid for the former VA property, which was put up for sale this year.

The property, at the northwest corner of Ninth Avenue and Clermont Street, is across the street from Rose Medical Center.

“With a growing community and the proximity to our main Rose campus, there could be the opportunity for additional medical infrastructure there,” HealthOne spokeswoman Stephanie Sullivan said.

Sullivan didn’t release specifics of the bid, and said Rose and HealthOne don’t know when they will hear back regarding it.

It’s unclear if other bids have been submitted for the property. A spokesman for the General Services Administration, a federal agency that manages the government’s real estate, hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of press time.

The hospital in the Hale neighborhood was replaced by a new facility, known as Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center, that the Department of Veterans Affairs opened in Aurora in 2018.

The entire former Denver VA Medical Center campus is about 13 acres and consists of 18 buildings, including the main hospital — which tops out around 10 stories — a 60‐bed nursing home and an eight‐story parking garage. As of early March, all the structures were vacant with the exception of a post‐traumatic stress disorder treatment facility operating in the nursing home building in the northeast corner of the campus.

The VA has “excessed” eight acres of the Denver property, generally the southern two-thirds, to the GSA, which is tasked with selling it.

The sale of the property was recommended by the Public Buildings Reform Board, a panel convened by the government in 2016 and tasked with finding real estate assets that could be sold.

The board zeroed in on the former hospital and 11 other holdings in a 2019 report, saying they were collectively worth between $500 million and $750 million. The other properties are in California, Idaho, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington and Maryland.

Originally, the board recommended that the 12 properties be sold individually. Then, this year, the board changed its recommendation to a portfolio sale — meaning all sites be sold to one buyer — due to “the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the commercial real estate market,” according to the board’s website.

In April, one of the properties, in Seattle, was removed from the for-sale list following a lawsuit, leaving 11 properties, including the one in Denver. A GSA spokeswoman recently told The New York Times that the agency has ultimately decided to sell the properties individually, not as a single portfolio.

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