A vacant office building in Centennial is poised to be demolished and replaced with an apartment complex.
The southern suburb’s city council last week approved a rezoning request from The Garrett Cos., an Indiana-based multifamily developer, for 6901 S. Havana St.
The 18.9-acre site on the east side of Interstate 25 near Topgolf currently has a two-story, 130,000-square-foot office building on it that dates to 1989. It has been vacant since April.
Garrett Cos. intends to construct 368 multifamily units on the property across 14 buildings, the tallest of which would be four stories, according to documents submitted to the city.
Garrett Cos. Director of Development Colin Wattleworth told council members last week that the Centennial/Inverness submarket has “really high vacancy” in the office sector, higher than Denver proper.
“What this is telling us is that office space is not in demand in the submarket and that it’s oversupplied. We’re proposing to convert that site … away from a use that’s not in demand into needed housing,” he said.
Garrett Cos. has yet to buy the site, but a company spokesman told BusinessDen that should happen around the end of the year. The property is owned by Centura Health Corp., the nonprofit hospital system that broke up in 2023, with its hospitals being divided by CommonSpirit Health and AdventHealth.
“With the disaffiliation of Centura and the increase in remote work, we no longer have a need for this space,” CommonSpirit spokeswoman Lindsay Radford Foster said in an email.
Due to its ownership by a nonprofit health system, Wattleworth said the property is currently exempt from paying property taxes. His firm expects annual tax bills of about $650,000 when its project is done. The company told Centennial it hopes to break ground in the first quarter of next year.
Garrett Cos. has an office in Denver and has done about 25 projects along the Front Range, including one in Centennial itself — the 149-unit Mezz at Fiddler’s Green at 6440 S. Syracuse Way.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with comment from a CommonSpirit spokeswoman.
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