Vacant new Rino office building Rev360 sells for $72 million

Ed Haselden never wanted to develop a spec office building.

When he and his partners broke ground on Rev360 at 3600 Brighton Blvd. in spring 2019, they had a marquee tenant planning to move in. Wework had committed to taking two of the building’s five floors.

But the coworking company underwent something of an implosion in its first attempt to go public in late 2019. Then the pandemic hit, freezing most major office leasing activity. By the fall of last year, Wework had decided it wouldn’t open at Rev360 — backing out of a signed lease. Several months later, the company would close several of its Denver locations.

That meant Rev360, completed in July 2020, was sitting vacant.

“Our objective was never to own a 100 percent spec building,” Haselden told Businessden Tuesday. “It was really putting us in a situation where that’s not what we do.”

Last week, Haselden and his development partners — Keystone Equities, Rob Cohen and Tributary Real Estate — sold Rev360 to San Francisco-based Shorenstein Properties, both parties confirmed.

Shorenstein paid $72 million for the 170,234-squarefoot building, according to public records. That works out to $423 a square foot.

Haselden said Shorenstein is “a very patient real estate investor” — and patience might be required to lease an entire office building lately.

“It seems like every time the office market starts to recover, there’s another coronavirus variant that rears its head,” he said.

Shorenstein is also partnering with Denver-based Nichols Partnership to develop the five-story One Platte office building at 1701 Platte St., which will be completed next year.

This is the company’s first deal in Rino; it previously owned Denver City Center downtown, selling the two office towers for $400 million in early 2020.

This is the second time in three months that a Rino office building completed during the pandemic has sold with no tenants in place. The eight-story Hub North building at 3660 Blake St. sold for $40.5 million, or $365 a square foot, in September.

Haselden said he and his partners originally planned to “stabilize and sell” Rev360 after finishing it — basically, find a buyer once much of the space had been leased. But he said they opted to shop the asset when it became clear that point wouldn’t be reached anytime soon.

“Whoever was going to hold this building was going to have to hold it for another three, four years,” he said. CBRE represented Haselden’s group in the sale. Rev360 isn’t the only prominent new office building seeking tenants in Denver. The newest skyscraper downtown, the 30-story Block 162 at 675 15th St., has about 600,000 square feet of office space. Only one tenant — law firm Sherman & Howard — has been announced.