Downtown Denver parking lot eyed for 81-story building sells to different developer
The land deal that was allegedly going to bring an 81-story skyscraper to downtown Denver fell apart a year and a half ago, and now the choice patch of land previously tabbed for that project has sold to another developer.
Boston-area company Harbinger Development ponied up $17.5 million for the parking lot at the southeast corner of 17th and California streets, according to Buzz Geller, managing partner of Paradise Investment Properties, the company that has controlled the centrally located parcel since 2002.
At $700 for each of the lot’s 25,000 or so square feet, the sale represents a record price for undeveloped land in the city, said Geller, who has worked in real estate in the city for better than 30 years. Researchers in the Denver office of international real estate services firm CBRE on Tuesday confirmed that claim.
“(This sale) shows that the city is still on the move,” Geller said. “And there is less land than ever to build on in the downtown area.”
Officials with Harbinger did not return The under York Capital, Another development closing calls contract City-based made seeking East the for deal, Coast two firm comment Greenwich about Geller years had developer, 100 the said. worth Tuesday. property days Realty New before of monthly contract purchase payments before early last failing to year, keep to according the close lot on under the to Geller. dead in He February declared 2018. that arrangement Greenwich partner, and Michael its boisterous Ursini, managing made waves in Denver in September 2017 when conceptual plans for a 1,000-foottall tower the company aimed to build on the property leaked online. If built, the condo/hotel/retail tower dubbed Six Fifty 17 would have been by far the tallest building in Denver. Those plans never got off the ground.
Geller said a video on his website, prepared by Denver’s Davis Partnership Architects, provides “a lot more realistic” interpretation of what can go on the roughly half-acre lot compared with what Greenwich was proposing.
Geller’s company owns a number of other parking lots in Denver’s core
neighborhoods, including a large site — more than 1.25 acres — along 19th Street between Lawrence and Arapahoe streets that is now under contract with a Colorado-based developer. Kairoi Residential’s plans for a high-rise apartment building on another Paradise-owned lot, part of the “Bell Park” property at Speer Boulevard and Larimer Street, will be discussed at a Lower Downtown Design Review Board hearing Sept. 5, Geller said.