Panelists: NoCo commerical real estate improving

By Molly Armbrister
Northern Colorado Business Report

FORT COLLINS - A panel of commercial real estate professionals expressed slowly-returning confidence in the Northern Colorado market Wednesday.

Specific segments of the market are definitely beginning to pick up speed, including office space, according to Josh Guernsey, a partner at Brinkman Partners.

"The office market took a pretty solid hit," Guernsey said, but office real estate, particularly Class A space, is making a comeback. Class B and C are also improving, but not at the same rate, Guernsey said.

Guernsey was joined on the panel - hosted by the Everitt Real Estate Center - by Russell Baker, a vice president at Cassidy Turley Fuller Real Estate; Mike Hill, vice president of multi-family development operations, McWhinney, and Nathan Klein, partner and broker associate at Loveland Commercial. The panel was moderated by Steve Stansfield, president of Realtec Commercial.
Loveland office space has not seen the same improvements as Fort Collins, according to Klein, because Loveland has less Class A space to offer.

Retail is another segment that is seeing improvement, and Northern Colorado is on the radar for a number of national retailers, said Guernsey, whose company manages Front Range Village in Fort Collins. The shopping center is at 92 percent occupancy, Guernsey said.

The multi-family market continues to serve as a strong presence in the market, according to Hill, whose company was not involved at all in the mulit-family market four years ago and is now a major player.

McWhinney's customers tend to be more educated when they begin looking for a place to live, have done their research and are ready to negotiate, Hill said. Many of those McWhinney serves are also "rent by choice" customers who could afford to buy but choose to rent for a variety of reasons.

Conventional loans for commercial real estate are still hard to come by, according to Baker, who said that most of his customers are building with cash. Baker estimated that it could be another one or two years before local banks begin financing projects again, but that some national banks have begun making their way slowly back into the commercial realm.