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Some might see downtown Denver as a ghost town. Asher Luzzatto sees a boomtown.
The Los Angeles real estate developer paid more than $5 million for downtown Denver’s 785,000-square-foot Energy Center last year, 97% below what a previous owner paid in 2013, according to the Wall Street Journal. In a matter of months, he scooped up four office buildings for pennies on the dollar and now controls over 7% of Denver’s traditional downtown office space. His plan is to convert the mostly empty towers into roughly 1,100 apartments, plus a bookstore, art gallery, children’s museum and daycare center.
Remote work has devastated downtown business districts from St. Louis to Portland. Nearly 40% of downtown Denver’s office space still sits vacant, the highest rate among the country’s top 50 cities. Those rock-bottom prices make conversions economically feasible, Luzzatto says, and he scored a vote of confidence in March when a quasi-government authority approved a $63 million loan, its largest ever. His competitors, he said, “had a lot of trouble seeing past what is here today.”