The planned River Mile project — a massive redevelopment that aims to transform a milelong stretch of downtown Denver southeast of the Platte River — just got a little more ambitious.
Kroenke Sports & Entertainment and Revesco Properties, the entities behind River Mile, just bought an additional 2.5 acres in the Sun Valley neighborhood. The new portfolio, which includes five buildings on seven parcels and was sold for $7.35M, is directly south of the 62-acre River Mile site, which will eventually extend along the river from Speer Boulevard to West Colfax Avenue.
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The acquisition grows the footprint of what was already a massive project — one that aims to add 4.7M SF of commercial space, 500K SF of retail, a new public school and 7,600 residences to downtown in the next 25 years. River Mile’s first residential offerings, including an estimated 1,500 residences, are supposed to go on the market in 2024, according to the project’s website.
The five-property portfolio was once the site of the Siegel Oil Co., a Colorado petroleum distributor sold to a Massachusetts-based firm, Diesel Direct, in 2017.
Evan Makovsky, Dorit Fischer and Hayden Hirschfied of NAI Shames Makovsky represented the seller, the Siegel family, according to a press release. It’s unclear what the new owners will do with the land and buildings, but it appears that the close proximity to River Mile’s south boundary was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“It’s a site that I don’t necessarily have a vision for,” Revesco President and CEO Rhys Duggan told BusinessDen. “But if I didn’t buy it, five years from now I would look back and wonder why we didn’t buy it.”
The new acquisition is also only one block south from Meow Wolf, the buzzy and eye-catching immersive art installation that opened in 2021. That $60M project, also developed by KSE and Revesco, has made national headlines and helped to drive crowds to an otherwise sleepy section of the city.
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“We’ve had a lot of interest from entertainment groups that want Meow Wolf proximity,” Duggan, who is marketing the site’s existing industrial buildings for lease, told BusinessDen.
KSE, a Denver-based sports and entertainment holding group, also owns nearby Ball Arena, as well as two of the pro sports teams that play there, the Nuggets and the Avalanche. KSE and Revesco also own Denver’s historic amusement park Elitch Gardens, which is likely be moved entirely to make room for River Mile. In 2020, their partnership received a $124.6M loan to retire Elitch's debt and redevelop that portion of the site.
