Office hotbed: steeped in residential variety, Arvada breaks for commercial.

• Author: Titus, Stephen
• Position: Real estate developers-projects

IF ARVADA HAS A CLAIM TO FAME, IT MIGHT BE AS GROUND zero for the Colorado "Soccer Mom." The 35-square-mile city of about 103,000 is home to the 200-acre Stenger Soccer Complex and the adjacent Harold D. Lutz Sports Complex, a rectangular collection of more than a dozen finely groomed soccer fields and accompanying support facility.

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This head-turning playground is surrounded by old and new developments full of homes in almost every price range, and a healthy sprinkling of horse properties and open space with views ranging from the Flatirons in Boulder to Table Mesa in Golden.

The city also, however, is a surprising hotbed of office and light-industrial development that is thriving at a time when most non-residential developers around the area are struggling to fill space.

"We've stayed busy over the last two or three years while everyone else was in Florida," said Fred Baker, director of marketing for Ojala Corp. "You really have to look at projects on an individual basis; you have to know where the need is. That's the moving target."

Baker said Ojala's six-member brokerage team spends a great deal of time researching industry sectors where commercial space is needed, rather than following growth out to areas like the Denver Tech Center or Centennial. "We have a full-time person who does nothing but that," he said of searching for hot development spots.

Ojala, a design/build firm, has erected 25 commercial buildings in Arvada and the Denver area since 1978. Its newest project, Rainbow Ridge Office Park, is planned for the corner of 56th Drive and Ward Road.

With ground breaking scheduled in September, Ojala's newest addition to the ongoing collection of mid-rise office buildings is already nearly filled, with three tenants occupying 45,000 square feet and the remaining square footage slated for retail service businesses.

A list of projects being reviewed by Arvada's planning department includes 16 commercial projects compared with just two or three residential offerings, but the residential projects that are already underway are popular. In August, Remington Homes started selling 30 new homes in its Saddlebrook project and had deposits on more than half of the available units in the first day of sales. Several customers camped out at the sales office for as long as three days to ensure they could score a home in the development.

"It's just a really nice community," said a humble Ron Hauptman, president of Remington...