RiNo Hits Peak Cool: Millennials Like It, So Do Investors

For out-of-town investors, RiNo's the place to be. Recently Seattle's Urban Renaissance Group and Stars Investments snapped up the 2301 Blake St office and retail building in the neighborhood.

“RiNo's experienced an incredible recent transformation, and we look forward to continuing work there as an owner and a developer,” URG CEO Patrick Callahan tells us. The 55k SF 2301 Blake is URG and Stars Investments’ second deal in Denver. Co-working firm Spaces, a Regus brand, will occupy all the office space in the building, which is slated to open in October.

Spaces will offer working environments for startups, entrepreneurs and other business professionals, with shared and private offices with flexible terms; meeting rooms with communication and presentation technologies; concierge-level hospitality services; and more. The building’s 20k SF of retail space is occupied by sports pub Blake Street Tavern. The purchase includes two adjacent parking lots for future development. 

One of the attractive features of RiNo is a little hard to define: it's cool. RiNo's one of the coolest districts in the nation, according to a recent Cushman & Wakefield report. Can you define cool? "For this report we surveyed hundreds of our real estate professionals across the United States and Canada," the company says, asking about livability and retail flavor, residential and retail rents, demographics and a thing called the Hip-O-Meter.

"We asked all survey participants to rank...individual neighborhoods in terms of where they are in the Cool Street cycle," the report explains, which put place on the Hip-O-Meter: Edgy/Cool; Up & Coming; Prime Hipness; Still Cool, But Going Mainstream; Gone Mainstream. Besides RiNo, other Prime Hipness places (or Peak Cool, as we call it) include Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Logan Square in Chicago, Silver Lake in LA, Wynwood in Miami, Jackson Square in San Francisco and Shaw in DC.