In its five years, Ulysses Development Group has outgrown its Cherry Creek office space four times.
The first three times, the Denver-based firm expanded within the building at 210 University Blvd., where it started with six employees in a windowless basement.
“The office space … right now is a combination of multiple spaces, and it took a minor miracle for that to come together,” co-founder Yoni Gruskin said. “We’ve just been constantly working through this Cherry Creek office space jigsaw puzzle.”
But the puzzle will soon be over. The business founded by Gruskin and Connor Larr recently leased a 21,000-square-foot office at 250 Fillmore St. in Cherry Creek, a few blocks away.
Ulysses today has a team of 60 and is active in nearly a dozen states. Itap built 2,700 apartments and is actively building or planning 3,000 more, including a multiphase project on the Central Park train station’s parking lot.
The business currently occupies 16,000 square feet on the second and fourth floors of 210 University. Gruskin said Ulysses’ next move should be its last for a while.
“We feel that where we’re moving into, we should be able to stay for the entire 10-year term of that lease,” he said.
The company’s growth is a testament to the demand for income-restricted housing across the country, Gruskin said. But the scale and pace of the work have required larger and larger teams. Nearly all of its employees come to the office five days a week.
“The office is super important because thatap how you can be successful and scale in this business,” said Larr.
The two wanted to stay put in Cherry Creek, the city’s hottest office market, where space is tight, and rents are high. Ulysses was also working against its own internal clock, needing to add more employees in short order to keep up with its growth. That made leasing space in a planned office building or one under construction a nonstarter due to uncertainty about timing.
Fortunately, their office broker spotted an opportunity. Spaces, a coworking firm, was leaving its office space on the third floor of 250 Fillmore. Ulysses quickly jumped on the opportunity.
“The exercise in Cherry Creek is either paying very close attention to lease expirations or moves, which don’t happen frequently,” Larr said.
The path forward is to keep building and to add more services to the buildings. Ulysses works with a third-party property management company to help run its complexes, but some residents require extra care and attention that the developer wants to provide itself.
One such example is up in Broomfield, where the company is building the 152-unit Harvest Hill project. Several apartments will be reserved for those with intellectual disabilities. And in Phoenix, Arizona, Ulysses reserved a handful of units for women escaping domestic violence or sex trafficking at a new build.
The company doesn’t just do ground-up work, either. In Eagle, it recently completed a 120-unit project that nearly saw its 30-year income-restriction covenants expire. Ulysses purchased the building, spent $90,000 per unit on renovations, and renewed the income restrictions for an additional 60 years.
Larr added that the building makes up half of the income-restricted housing stock in the tiny mountain town off Interstate 70.
“The thing we love about the affordable housing space is that no two projects are the same,” Gruskin said.
Gruskin and Larr met in New York City in their first year out of college, when they both worked as analysts at Citibank’s municipal bond division. The two then worked together at real estate firm Related Cos. Gruskin focused on income-restricted housing while Larr worked on large, mixed-use projects.
Larr, 38, who is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, stayed out East while the 37-year-old Gruskin, a Denver native, eventually moved to California. The two stayed in touch throughout the years, and when Gruskin began laying the groundwork for Ulysses in late 2020, he knew Larr would make the perfect business partner.
The name Ulysses comes from the title of a poem written by Alfred Tennyson.
“’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” Gruskin said, quoting the poem.
“This is a hard business we’re in, but ultimately we want to remember why we’re doing it, and know that if we go headfirst in these challenges, there’s a great deal we can accomplish,” he said.
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