Ad agency bails on McGregor Square HQ after moving from Boulder

This story first appeared on BusinessDen.com, a BizWest news partner.

An advertising agency has left McGregor Square, months after shifting its headquarters there from Boulder.

Crispin Porter Bogusky, or CPB, has subleased its 18,000 square feet of third-floor office space in the project across from Coors Field to cybersecurity firm CyberGRX, representatives of both companies confirmed to BusinessDen.

CPB announced in December 2020 that it would move to McGregor Square from Boulder, where it had been headquartered for 14 years. The company said it expected to make the move around July 2021.

AdAge reported at the time that the company had 60,000 square feet in Boulder and was coming off a “particularly rough” year that saw co-founder Alex Bogusky depart the firm and the loss of Domino’s as a client after 13 years.

In a Thursday email, CPB spokesman David Whitney attributed the sublease decision to new management. The company announced a new CEO, chief strategy officer and head of production last April.

“In the middle of last year, CPB brought on new executive leadership and announced that the agency would be moving to a distributed network,” Whitney said. “We’re in the midst of that pilot program.”

Whitney declined to address additional questions. CPB has changed the main address shown on its website to 1766 W. 46th Ave. in Denver, which corresponds to a post office.

Sublessor CyberGRX, meanwhile, previously leased about 16,000 square feet at 1637 Wazee St., according to CEO Fred Kneip, who founded the firm in 2016. The company let that lease expire during the pandemic, going fully remote for a while.

Kneip said that, back in 2020, the company thought its next space might need to be closer to 30,000 square feet. But the company dialed that back as it accepted that partial work-from-home would be a company standard going forward.

Kneip said CyberGRX — which has about 160 employees, about two-thirds of whom live in the Denver area — wanted to stay in LoDo, making McGregor Square a logical choice.

“It’s a phenomenal location with a great atmosphere,” he said, adding the firm moves in this week.

The loss of CPB is the first tenant turnover for McGregor Square, which was completed early last year.

CPB’s lease was unusual for a new office project because it was only for two years, a short term that might not fly with large institutional landlords. But Jordan Deifik, a broker marketing the project, told BusinessDen in December that McGregor Square’s development team, which includes Colorado Rockies co-owner Dick Monfort, had “gone above and beyond in terms of creative structures” in order to get people in the building.

McGregor Square General Manager Patrick Walsh said last week that the office building is 82 percent leased, with 14,000 square feet on the sixth floor and 25,000 square feet on the fourth floor available.

“We are close on both spaces, which will get us fully leased if those go through,” Walsh said.

Other tenants include cybersecurity firm Red Canary (about 43,000 square feet), law firm Lewis Roca (31,000) and vacation club Exclusive Resorts (19,000). McGregor Square also has hotel and condo buildings, and a number of retail tenants including Tattered Cover bookstore.

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