A Centennial office building that was once the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company is being demolished less than a quarter-century after being built.
The 9201 E. Dry Creek Road building, which was home to Arrow Electronics until last year, is being knocked down by crews from American Demolition.
Built in 2001, the approximately 125,000-square-foot structure sold for $24.9 million three years later. Arrow Electronics, an electronic component firm, leased the whole building in 2014, a few years after moving its headquarters to Colorado from New York. The building sold again in 2019, for $40.1 million.
Arrow moved out in mid-2024, leaving the building empty in a post-pandemic world of reduced office demand. The firm headquarters is now across the street.
In December, 9201 E. Dry Creek sold once again. Arapahoe County-based Consolidated Investment Group paid $12.25 million — a 70% drop from the 2019 sale.
At the time, the buyer knew it wanted to do a residential project at the site but wasn’t sure how to approach the existing building.
One option was to convert it into apartments and build more apartments around it. The second was to demolish the building and build entirely anew.
The company ultimately chose the latter option.
CIG Chief Operating Officer Dan Velazquez attributed the decision to a couple factors. One was where the building sat on the 9-acre site — a relatively central spot that didn’t naturally lend itself to being built around.
“It was going to create this awkward geometry,” Velazquez told BusinessDen this week.
Additionally, CIG decided the new construction would be modular, in which individual units are constructed elsewhere and stacked together on the site. That would require different contractors than would be needed for an office conversion, creating “almost two projects on the same site,” Velazquez said.
And, more broadly, it came down to money.
“Ultimately it was really costs that drove our decision,” he said.
Velazquez noted that office conversions tend to get some kind of government subsidy, which is “really not our favored approach” at CIG, given that the money could come with strings attached.
Demolition won’t immediately give way to construction. CIG’s development plans are still being reviewed by Centennial, so the hope is to start work on an approximately 325-unit apartment project next spring.
But Velazquez said CIG remains interested in buying other distressed office buildings, including for possible conversion.
“It was a tough decision,” he said. “Our founder and CEO (David Merage) hated to see a less-than-25-year-old building come down.”
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