By Opportunity Zone Magazine Staff
The J.A. Green Development Corp. has broken ground on JAG Logistics Center at DIA, an industrial park just south of Denver International Airport in Aurora, Colorado. The freight forwarding and logistics park will offer its tenants the closest proximity and access to the airport tarmac of any industrial business park in the area.
“The entire development is the single largest development in JAG’s history and will contain over 3,000,000 square feet of class A industrial space on 250 acres of land,” says Daniel Green, CEO and Co-Managing Partner of JAG, which specializes in airport adjacent industrial development.
The project will be developed, owned and managed by JAG with Cushman & Wakefield handling the leasing of Aurora’s newest and largest freight forwarding and logistics park in the greater metro area. The Aurora Economic Development Council has worked closely with JAG, the Porteos development, and Cushman & Wakefield to bring the project to fruition.
Green says their first phase, which is the western part of their property on 75 acres, will have approximately one million square feet of cross dock and column-free warehouse buildings with second floor mezzanine space. He says the first building, built on spec, will be approximately 188,000-square-feet and that they will continue to add similar sized buildings as they lease.
“The eastern part of the property contains approximately 175 acres of land where we are planning on developing larger build-to-suit warehouses ranging in size from 250,000 to 1,000,000 square feet. It will be terrific product mix because we can offer warehouse space as little as 10,000 square feet or as much as 1,000,000 plus in the same development,” says Green.
The property, located in a designated Opportunity Zone, is also located in an enterprise zone and a foreign trade zone.
“Being able to take advantage of the variety of benefits these programs offer is a tremendous win-win scenario for all involved stakeholders,” Yuriy Gorlov, AEDC vice president said, in a statement.
Green says they are relocating their own corporate offices to the JAG Logistics Center at DIA, adding that his company could become a qualified Opportunity Zone business.
Green says receiving the OZ designation for the project really helped make it more viable considering the cost burden for all of the roads, water, sewer and storm drain improvements they will need to cover. He says it freed up additional capital to lessen the initial impact of the heavy upfront cost of development and that the added long-term benefits of the OZs were equally appealing.
“There are many areas throughout the U.S. that could be completely re-imagined if only given a little push—and I think that’s what this does,” says Green.