Prior to the pandemic, Jon Dwight planned to build a 14-story office building and a 16-story hotel on the 1485 40th St. block in RiNo.
On Thursday, he and his partners held a groundbreaking ceremony for a 13-story, 301-unit apartment building.
“Thatap just what we do in this business,” he said. “We have to shift to meet markets.”
Dwight of Invest Development Partners is building the Ave Station House project in conjunction with Halpern Real Estate Ventures and RXR, both New York-based firms, as well as Pennsylvania-based Korman Communities.
The $103.8 million project, which will also have 6,000 square feet of retail space, is RXR’s first in Denver. Itap being built on 1.2 acres, an irregular city block formed by Walnut and Blake streets, along with 40th Avenue. The Regional Transportation Districtap 38th and Blake rail stop is just down the street.
Groundbreaking has been a long time coming for Dwight. In 2016, he said, he went under contract to buy the block as well as the similarly shaped one across the street at 1335 40th St. At the time, both were used by operators.
Dwight bought the western block, where Ave Station House is going up, in 2017. He bought the eastern block in 2019, after having built a new facility in Aurora for Mile Hi Express, the cold-storage warehouse and trucking company that sold the site.
In August 2019, with both blocks secured, Dwight brought on Halpern Real Estate Ventures and announced plans for Train, a mixed-use project across both blocks. The west block would have the office and hotel towers, and the east block would have hotel and apartment towers, as well as a 400-seat entertainment venue. Both sides would have two levels of retail and restaurant space at the base of the towers.
Then came COVID.
“When the pandemic hit, the world shifted,” Dwight said. “We then shifted gears on the project.”
RXR came on as a partner in the now apartment-centric project in the third quarter of 2022, Dwight said. The company had a long-standing relationship with Halpern.
The companies, working with Oz Architecture, drew up plans for a 17-story tower with about 400 units. Denver approved the plans last year.
Then, Dwight said, lenders got wary of financing a project that large. So the developers lopped off four floors and sent the amended development plans to the city.
Dwight praised the new leadership at Denver’s Community Planning and Development department, saying the organization worked swiftly to review the amended plans.
“Brad (Buchanan) is making a difference at CPD,” Dwight said, referring to the departmentap new director.
Buchanan spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony Thursday. He rattled off his cell phone number. Then, he repeated it.
“Call me with your ideas, call me with your questions,” he said.
“We want to make it easier to build in Denver,” Mayor Mike Johnston said at the ceremony.
Dwightap project is not the only one in RiNo that shifted significantly. Two blocks away, Denver-based Formativ broke ground last summer on an apartment building at 3850 Blake St., where an office building and hotel were planned pre-pandemic.
Denver has an oversupply of apartments right now, thanks to a flurry of developers breaking ground when interest rates were low amid the pandemic. Rents have fallen, and incentives like free rent are at a 15-year high.
But Ave Station House isn’t expected to be completed until 2028, and Dwight said he believes that Denver will have worked through its apartment oversupply by then. Relatively few apartments are currently under construction in the city.
“I think Denver is going to have a complete lack of supply,” Dwight said of a couple years from now. He’s also planning to build apartments on his eastern block.
Brinkmann Constructors is the general contractor of Ave Station House. The project isn’t the only major apartment groundbreaking in RiNo this year. San Francisco, California-based Carmel Partners also recently started work on a 481-unit project on a full city block at 3300 Blake St.
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