The Land Purveyors

The southeast corner of Denver started to develop and grow back in the 1960s and 1970s, but it always took a quiet backseat to the downtown area. Recently, however, this unassuming quadrant has become, for good reason, an important alternative as the central business district has matured: it’s close to Centennial Airport, the third-busiest general-aviation airport in the United States, and its traversed by Interstate 25, E-470, and other main arteries that run through and around the city. It is also home to 23 business parks, and as a result, more and more prominent businesses—including Lockheed Martin; Oppenheimer Funds; several oil, gas, and mining companies; and even the Denver Broncos—are calling the area home.

One of the parks is Dove Valley Business Park, owned by general partner Angelo Mariani and several limited partners, who together compose Dove Valley Business Park Associates, Ltd. Assembled in the early 1980s by developer Bill Walters, the property is a mixed-use office and warehousing subset of 2,300 acres in the Dove Valley Metropolitan District, which is managed by Special District Management Services. Nearly four years after the financial crash of 2008, selling the real estate here is still challenging, but the owners’ hard work and preplanning have helped them sweeten the deal for prospective buyers already eyeing the site’s prime location and amenities.

In addition to I-25 and the Centennial Airport, there’s also Arapahoe County Community Park and a bedroom community just a short drive away, where top executives can make their homes, according to Jerry Kempf, sales and leasing representative for Unique Properties, LLC, Dove Valley’s listing agency. “[The property is] also adjacent to Lincoln Avenue, which is another artery,” he says. These draws and others are what lead the Broncos to establish their administrative headquarters and practice facilities there.

Over the past three decades, about 650 of Dove Valley’s 1,000 acres have been sold off, dedicated for right-of-way, or improved. That leaves 350 acres left for sale, with some tracts as large as 100–150 acres, and after two relatively inactive years because of the recession, the owners and property managers are not only excited to see an uptick happening in the market; they are fully prepared for new buyers thanks to several initiatives they have undertaken to make the property development-ready.

“The most valuable feature is that Dove Valley has an approved master development plan [MDP],” says Glenn Sandler, project manager for the land-ownership firm. “With the MDP in place, development plans are now done administratively, so it’s a more expedient process, streamlining approvals by at least two to four months. With vested zoning rights or uses by right, if a prospective buyer submits a plan for an approved use, provided their design meets the development guidelines of the MDP, they will not be denied. It becomes an objective analysis for the county rather than a subjective one. That’s an attractive selling point.”

Another benefit to Dove Valley is that much of its infrastructure is already in place. “We have utilities running underneath or adjacent to the roadways as well as monument signage and traffic signals already installed,” Sandler says. “And Broncos Parkway—a four-lane arterial—runs east-west through the park. Every parcel has frontage and access to a built-out or planned right-of-way, and many of those right-of-ways have utilities under them or nearby. Regional detention and water-quality ponds have also been completely built and are ready to service the area.”

In this way, Dove Valley’s efforts not only make the property itself more attractive; they also keep it build-ready, making it easier for developers and end users to lower their initial costs to qualify for loans. And in this difficult market, there is no doubt potential buyers will appreciate that. Clearly, those remaining 350 acres won’t be available for long. ABQ