Big deals

Headnote

Institutional investors, lured by low prices, growth, snap up regional real estate

Outside institutional investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into commercial properties in the Boulder Valley and Northern Colorado because they see a market with prices that leave room for profits, either as a landlord or through a quick flip.

In the past 18 months, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group, Balfour Capital Management, Cress Capital and Crescent Real Estate, all deep-pocket investment groups based elsewhere, have acquired major portfolios in the region.

The Campus at Longmont, Flatiron Park in east Boulder, prime buildings in downtown Boulder and a bevy of buildings in Fort Collins have been swept up by outsiders, signaling how attractive the market has become as other markets in the country have reached their price limits.

"Denver and Boulder have become the investment darlings of the country for institutional investors," said Geoffrey Keys, president of Keys Commercial Real Estate in Boulder, who has been working the local market for decades.

"Other markets such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Orange County, Austin, have priced out institutional investors," Keys said. "This area, along with U.S. 36 corridor properties, are "a pretty decent deal in terms of economic growth and cost of replacement. ... They are safer bets."

Consider these deals:

Campus at Longmont

Balfour Pacific Capital Inc., a real estate and private-equity firm based in Vancouver, Canada, acquired 27 commercial buildings in the Campus at Longmont for $69.6 million in June.

Balfour Pacific, led by Sam Belzberg, acquired the buildings, totaling 870,000 square feet, last month from Crescent Real Estate, which has dual headquarters in Centennial and Fort Worth, Texas.

Crescent Real Estate is the result of Fort Worth real estate investor John Goff and partners merging operations of two real estate firms - Crescent Real Estate Holdings and Goff Capital Partners - in July 2016.

In 2012, when Crescent was operating as Goff Capital Partners, it acquired 34 buildings totaling 1.13 square feet in the Campus at Longmont for $58.3 million from Circle Capital Longmont LLC. Recently, Crescent sold three of those buildings on the campus to Alaska-based Pacific Acquisitions LLC.

Flatiron Park

Crescent is in the thick of things at the business park in east Boulder that covers 200-acres with 52...