BY FREDA MIKLIN
STAFF WRITER
Bahman Shafa, owner of the three Triad office buildings at 5660, 5670, and 5680 Greenwood Plaza Boulevard, adjacent to the Orchard Light Rail Station in Greenwood Village, told The Villager in an exclusive interview that the property is likely proceeding to foreclosure because of the banking environment and market conditions that are outside his control. The property is held under the name Triad Focus LLC.
When he purchased the property in February 2020 for $54 million, which we reported at the time, it was 60% occupied, Shafa explained to us. He “Spent millions of dollars to improve the property. By April 2023, it was 70% occupied and breaking even financially.” Today, he told is, “It is 77% occupied.”
We reviewed current advertising for the three Triad buildings and calculated the cumulative amount of space currently available for rent to be 95,310 square feet out of 414,831 square feet of rentable space, which constitutes 23% of the total, exactly consistent with what Shafa told us. It is also worth noting that 77% occupancy is as good or better than most other similar office buildings in the area.
Our research also showed that 2022 real estate taxes for the three buildings, totaling $1,064,758, were paid three weeks before they were due and there are no real estate tax delinquencies for the property.
The problem, Shafa told The Villager, is that his loan came due and he has been unable to renew it on similar terms as those he got three years ago, just before the pandemic. With interest rates having risen precipitously since February 2020 and significantly fewer employees working in offices, “The banking environment has changed. Banks don’t want to lend on office space,” Shafa explained, continuing, “Operations were fine. The problem was that the debt came due. Our lender had no appetite for an extension and there were no new lenders willing to lend a similar amount with the same terms. We really had no options. We are still in talks with the lender, but, as of now, CBRE has been appointed as a receiver.”
He acknowledged that either foreclosure or the execution of a deed in lieu of foreclosure are realistic possibilities. In either case, his entire investment in the property would be lost.
The three buildings that comprise the Triad, two of which are six stories and one of which is five stories, are considered Class B office space, currently offered for rent at $29/square foot. They are laid out in the form of a hexagon with significant surface parking between them and extending out from them, creating a 22-acre complex. Unique and distinctive in their time, two of the buildings are now 60 years old. The third is 50 years old. Shafa told us that the fact that the space is Class B also makes financing more challenging because there is a significant amount of newer office space available.
The Triad plays an important role in land use planning in Greenwood Village. When the city created the master development plan for the area many years ago, which is still in effect, it called out the Triad buildings as the determining factor for the maximum allowable height for all other buildings in the area of the Orchard Light Rail Station.
A few short blocks away, the 163,647-square foot former Greenwood Village home of Comcast at 5800 S. Quebec Street was just acquired by Colorado Health and Tech Centers, a company formed by Afshin Safavi, Ph.D., who recently completed one term on the Cherry Hills Village City Council.
Safavi, a research scientist by training, bought the building for $5 million, a bargain compared to the $29 million the Arapahoe County Assessor says it is worth, as well as the $27 million it fetched when it last changed hands 10 years ago.
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