Denver Office Campus Lands Refi

Meridian Campus. Image courtesy of JLL

JLL Capital Markets has arranged a $32.5 million refinancing for Meridian Campus, a two-building 391,240-square-foot, Class A office campus in Englewood, Colo.

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The company secured the 10-year, fixed-rate loan through a life company correspondent on behalf of the owner/borrower, Meridian Office Partners LLC, of Reno, Nev.

Meridian Campus is at 12500 and 12510 E. Belford Ave. in Denver’s southeast suburban office submarket. The location is just south of I-25 and C/E-470, which provides connectivity to downtown, Denver International Airport and the broader southern metro area.

Completed in 1999 and 2000, the three-story buildings are fully leased to a single tenant. On-site amenities include a full-service cafeteria, fitness center, expansive conference and training rooms, a grab-and-go café, and underground executive parking.

The JLL Capital Markets team representing the borrower was led by Senior Managing Director Eric Tupler.

Meridian Campus is the former global headquarters of Western Union, which listed the property for sale in 2017 and completed its move to One Bellevue Station, also in the Denver Tech Center, late the following year. 

Meridian Office Partners paid $40 million for the property in January 2020, in a deal brokered by CBRE. The transaction evidently included about 49 acres of land for possible future development.

Meridian Office Partners is a low-profile company. JLL’s announcement referenced Perry Di Loreto as Meridian’s principal and managing member, and information online indicates that Di Loreto is also associated with a company called U.S. Matrix Construction.

Leasing woes

Despite a downward unemployment trend in Denver, the city’s office market hit an overall vacancy of 17.7 percent at the end of 2020, according to a fourth-quarter report from Cushman & Wakefield. That’s the highest vacancy figure since 2010, and it’s driven in large part by vacant sublease space.

Sublease space pounded the southeast suburban market (the metro’s largest office submarket) especially hard; Comcast alone added several large blocks of space. Southeast suburban has an overall vacancy of 18.9 percent on an inventory of nearly 33.9 million square feet, also according to Cushman & Wakefield.

The big completion in the Denver Tech Center in 2020 was Prime West’s delivery of a 340,000-square-foot building at 6900 Layton Ave., which became Newmont Mining’s new corporate headquarters, but also added roughly 110,000 square feet of unfilled space.