"We had been leasing the space to another company, Burnham Service Co. Inc., and it went bankrupt," Dick Rudolph, who heads leasing for Etkin Johnson, tells GlobeSt.com. "Within five days after they rejected our lease, we had found Nationwide for the entire space at a very darn good market rate," Rudolph says.
Burnham had been around since the 1920s and had been in the building before Etkin Johnson--one of the largest and most aggressive local investors and developers of real estate--bought the building seven years ago, Rudolph says. "They weren't a new economy company," he notes. "They were an old company that warehoused equipment and supplies. If you were Xerox, and you bought a ton of coffee machines, for example, they would store it for you."
The Denver division had remained profitable, which was frustrating for local employees, he says. "They bought a local company three years ago, and then they filed for bankruptcy," Rudolph says.
But Etkin Johnson didn't have any trouble replacing the company, although it hated to see the bankruptcy and the loss of a good, long-time tenant. "I think that's indicative of the strength of the Northeast market," Rudolph told GlobeSt.com. "Scott Patterson and Mike Wafer of Grubb & Ellis did a really good job for us.
It also helped that Etkin Johnson is a locally based company that makes decisions quickly, he says. "I can pop my head into the office of Bruce (Etkin) or David (Johnson), and have a decision in 30 seconds. If I were working for some out-of-state company, a big New York life insurance company or something, I'd have to jump through a bunch of hoops and processes. We probably would not have gotten this deal if we couldn't have acted on the spot."
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