When Alex Ringsby bought the office building at 1123 Auraria Parkway in early 1999, the stadium a few hundred feet away hadn’t opened yet.
“Ball Arena was under construction and it just seemed like a whole new world was going to unfold down there in the Platte Valley and the railyards there,” said Ringsby, who owns real estate firm Ringsby Realty.
Now that world has spilled over onto his property. Stan Kroenke — who owns Ball Arena, the Denver Nuggets and the Colorado Avalanche — purchased Ringsby’s 21,500-square-foot office building for $5.6 million, or $260 a foot, last week, according to public records.
The four-story building, constructed in 1901, is 100% leased, Ringsby said. It’s a long and narrow brick structure, only 30 feet wide.
“We’re just doing an internal restructuring and this just was an opportunity that arose out of Kroenke’s interest in owning everything down there,” Ringsby said. … “They’ve been knocking on the doors for years to buy it and we finally said yes.”
Kroenke’s real estate arm, The Kroenke Group, and Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which includes his sports holdings, didn’t respond to BusinessDen requests for comment.
The 77-year-old billionaire owns the parking lots around Ball Arena, and plans to develop them into a new 64-acre neighborhood. The Denver City Council signed off on the necessary rezoning earlier this year as part of a broader deal in which Kroenke agreed his teams would play at Ball through 2050.
Kroenke already owns a handful of the buildings that line Auraria Parkway on the arena side, including the real estate for Brooklyn’s, a bar frequented by fans before and after games.
Ringsby, meanwhile, is hopping off the parkway.
“We’re gonna miss the asset, but it’s gonna solve some problems for us internally,” he said.
Scott Patterson of Ringsby assisted his boss, Alex, in the deal, he said. Kroenke was represented by Darrin Revious of Pinnacle Real Estate.
Ringsby, a Denver native, originally purchased the building as an investment, and moved his company from Park Hill to the property a few years after he bought it. He then moved his office to 1336 Glenarm Place in 2015, and then to 1801 W. Colfax Ave. a couple years ago. He still owns the Glenarm property.
Ringsby Realty has been around since the 1950s. In 2002, Alex added a brokerage arm. The company makes investments, and does development and property management work as well. It employs a staff of eight.
“We bought it (1123 Auraria) to house our industrial real estate business and as an investment — we had exchanged out of another property — and it turned out to be a great building for us,” he said.
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