The Preston Center in the Wild Wood Business Park will be the largest class-A, multi-tenant office development under construction in Ft. Collins, says Drew Shearer, vice president of real estate development of Neenan, a construction, development and design firm. The first two buildings will total 120,000 sf and the third will have 20,000 sf, Shearer says. The completed value of the three buildings will be about $19 million, he says. The first 60,000 sf will be built on a spec basis.

Shearer says there is no other multi-tenant building of this size under construction in Fort Collins, which currently boasts a 7% office vacancy rate. A year ago, it had stood at 14%, he says. Big users, such as Hewlett Packard, however, own much larger single-use buildings, he says.

Construction of the second 60,000-sf building, a mirror image of Preston I, will begin after much of the first building is leased. The third building is much smaller, with about 20,000 sf. And it will have a log-cabin type of look, compared with the modern architecture of the two larger buildings, Shearer says.

The smaller building will likely be a build-to-suit, he says. Neenan has designed, developed and built a similar building for the headquarters of The Group, the top locally based residential real estate brokerage firm in the Ft. Collins area.