Downtown Denver’s unwanted office tower is up for grabs.
The 17-story Columbine Place office tower at 216 16th St. will be auctioned off in early July through LoopNet.
The starting bid is $700,000 for the 150,000-square-foot building, which is 31% leased, according to marketing materials.
The tower’s past few years have been tumultuous.
In 2023, then-owner Columbine West 2 LLC, an affiliate of Montreal’s Toulon Development Co., defaulted on the building’s loan with $17.7 million unpaid. A judge put the property under the control of a receiver at the request of the property’s lender, an affiliate of Florida-based Rialto Capital.
Typically, a lender in such circumstances would opt to foreclose on the property. But in late 2025, Rialto opted to walk away and write off the loan, letting Toulon keep it.
That was likely largely due to the fact that the building had a ground lease, which means Toulon owned the structure but not the land beneath it. And the landowner hadn’t been fully paid either, meaning it could terminate the ground lease and take the building.
By February, the landowner — the University of Hawaii Foundation — had done just that, giving it ownership of the tower.
Now, the foundation, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, wants to move on.
Both the land and the building are included in the sale, according to marketing materials. Denver’s assessor values the parcels at a combined $11.9 million.
The building needed significant repairs as of last fall. John Rothschild Jr., the Newmark receiver who ran the building for about two years, said in October that three of the five elevators were out of service.
“Other unresolved maintenance issues include ongoing HVAC issues, utility outage issues, garage ventilation fan replacement, building access (key fob) issues, fire dry system repairs, and other general Property maintenance issues,” he said in court records last fall.
While the University of Hawaii Foundation wants out of downtown Denver, another university foundation wants in.
The University of Colorado Foundation is under contract to buy Independence Plaza, a 25-story, 567,000-square-foot office tower at 1050 17th St.
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