Mercury’s big move to its new headquarters, Mercury Village, has created a glut of vacant office space in Durango.
Mercury is vacating about 70,000 square feet of office space in the Durango Tech Center, company spokeswoman Marie Rotter said in an email message. The move will be complete by today.
Mercury Village, which opened in south Durango in late May, is 80,000 square feet.
Mercury leased space in several Tech Center buildings from multiple owners, including 9 and 10 Burnett Court, 135 and 161 Burnett Drive, and two locations on Rockpoint Drive, Rotter said.
At Mercury’s former Tech Center buildings, “for lease” signs and empty parking lots replace what was a busy hub for Durango’s largest homegrown company.
Combined with other vacancies, there’s about 100,000 square feet available in the Tech Center alone, said Roger Zalneraitis, executive director of the La Plata Economic Development Alliance.
It could take years for Durango to absorb all of the vacant office space, local experts said. The vacancies also could discourage building new office space, at least in the short term.
“If you look at how the market has performed since 2007, you would expect it to take five years or so to fill up the space that Mercury has vacated,” Zalneraitis said. “However, I am optimistic that the office space in Durango Tech Park could be absorbed faster than that. We might be looking at substantially full occupancy in 2½ to three years, especially if our economy keeps performing as strongly as it is right now.”
Zalneraitis’ economic development group is marketing the vacancies in hopes of luring a major employer.
“We’re seeing indications of a really vibrant market, and that’s pretty good space up there,” he said. “So you could see a lot of people looking at that.”
A 2011 study by Russell Planning and Engineering found Durango can absorb 40,000 to 60,000 square feet of office space per year.
The largest space Mercury vacated was 10 Burnett Court. The company leased the entire building, which has 30,000 square feet of leasable space.
The building is tricked-up for high-tech uses, featuring redundant fiber links to Albuquerque and Grand Junction and separately cooled server rooms.
Christina Rinderle, the property’s leasing agent for The Wells Group, said the building would be a good fit for “anybody that needs computing power.”
The space in 10 Burnett Court could be split up a number of ways, Zalneraitis said. “There’s flexibility in that building that we haven’t had on the market in a long time.”
The building at 10 Burnett Court is owned by a partnership led by Bob Wolf of Durango.
At 9 Burnett Court, just less than 7,000 square feet is available, said building owner Carl Rand. Mercury occupied the building for about two years, he said.
Rand said he couldn’t recall a similar amount of commercial space coming onto the market at once.
“No, not in Durango,” he said. “(Mercury) grew into all this space over time.”
Bob Allen, a local real estate appraiser and analyst, said new business generation will be needed to absorb the vacated space.
cslothower@durangoherald.com
