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We all know the Front Range is a burgeoning home of tech companies. Colorado Springs does military tech, while Boulder is a well known center of entrepreneurship, and Denver is the big city at the heart of it all. And while we all have preconceived notions of what that tech scene looks like, data from CBRE, a real estate services firm, paints a picture of the area that may be surprising.
The CBRE study looked at the amount of office space tech firms used in different parts of the state. While you might expect Boulder to be the tech capital of Colorado, the numbers say something else entirely.
In terms of absolute numbers, Denver's 8.5 million sq. ft. of office space dedicated to tech firms is by far the largest in the state. To put the sheer size into perspective, if you moved all of Denver's tech firms into the Pentagon you'd still need another 2 million sq. ft. to accommodate them all. Inside Denver, the lion’s share of tech firms are not downtown, but located in the northwest part of the city, where they take up almost half of all the available office space.
Ok, so Denver is a big city, and of course it has the largest tech footprint. Surely Boulder is next, right? Nope.
The second largest tech footprint in the Front Range is actually in Ft. Collins, which has almost 3.1 million sq. ft. of tech offices. Colorado Springs comes in close behind with 2.9 million sq. ft. of tech offices, while Boulder comes in a distant 4th with almost 30 percent less tech office space. In fact, just two of downtown Denver's largest office buildings - the Republic Plaza and the Wells Fargo Center - could easily accommodate all of Boulder's tech firms with room to spare.
You might expect Boulder’s office space to be extremely expensive, but it’s not. While it is more expensive than in Colorado Springs, it’s on par with prices in Ft. Collins and way cheaper than downtown Denver. Regardless, it’s all cheaper than in San Francisco, where office space is going for $63 a square foot — almost twice as much as downtown Denver.
While the CBRE acknowledged the term ‘tech firm’ is more or less undefinable these days, they did their best to pinpoint high-tech industries in these cities. The study only counted high-tech services and high-tech manufacturing. This excluded telecommunications firms and data centers and focused on software publishers, e-commerce firms and computer component manufacturers.
