The old Robinson Dairy building is now in the hands of a young ownership group.
Matt Rakowich, 32, and Bryan Bennis, 33, are middle school friends turned real estate partners. Together, they purchased the 50-year-old warehouse at 2401 W. Sixth Ave. in Denver late last month for $8.8 million.
“We’re both Denver natives, and (Bennis) had a lot of background in the industrial space, and it made only sense for two younger guys to team up and try to get aggressive and get after deals,” Rakowich said.
The 54,000-square-foot industrial building sits on 3 acres. Records show it was sold by a partnership of three real estate entities, one of which was run by Jeff Barton, owner of the former Crazy Mountain Brewing space in Baker.
The recent deal works out to $162 per square foot based on the building, or $70 per square foot for the land.
“What we really like about the building is obviously the location, the density, just how infill it is,” Rakowich said. “And you combine that with having an acre of outdoor yard is pretty rare in that area.”
The property last traded for $5.6 million in 2018, according to public records.
Dorado Surfaces, a stone supplier, and Precision Homes occupy the entire property. It comes with 13,300 amps of power, enough to light up 133 single-family homes, an unusually high amount for a property of this age and size, the pair said.
Rakowich and Bennis bought the site as an investment, hoping to keep the tenants in place while waiting to see what happens down the street at Burnham Yard, where the Broncos are planning a stadium-anchored development.
“I think that area will likely only densify over the next five, 10 years,” Bennis said.
Rakowich said the pair financed the deal with a “single equity check” and a five-year, $5.5 million loan at 6% interest from Reinsurance Group of America. The two were solicited by Colliers brokers TJ Smith and Nick Rice.
“They brought it to us off-market,” Rakowich said. “I went to high school with Nick. He’s a good buddy of mine, so when I was getting this off the ground, I was kind of taking him out to beers and begging him to show me deals, just to get this going.”
Despite their youth, the two come to the deal table with years of real estate experience under their belts. Rakowich spent four years at JLL in Chicago in industrial brokerage work before spending some time in real estate banking in Los Angeles. His dad, Walt Rakowich, served as CEO of Prologis, the largest industrial real estate investor in the world, between 2008 and 2012. He’s on the board of his son’s nascent real estate company, Rak Realty Group.
“If he says no, we say no,” the younger Rakowich said.
Bennis, meanwhile, was most recently part of Southpeak Group, an industrial investor backed by Chilean investors. He also spent seven years at EverWest Real Estate Investors.
Bennis noted that, in the industrial sector, most deals don’t involve properties that the average person immediately recognizes.
“It’s never a landmark. You can never easily tell someone, ‘Oh, it’s the Robinson Dairy.’ So it’s really fun to be able to actually say that, just something everyone knows,” he said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, it’s a big rectangle by the airport.’”
Robinson Dairy, known for its large sign with pointy spires visible from Sixth Avenue, hasn’t operated in the building since 1999, when the Robinson family sold the business. The family continued to own the real estate, which included two neighboring properties, 677 Alcott St. and 646 Bryant St., until 2018, when the complex was purchased by Central Development.
That firm off-loaded the Bryant and Alcott Street buildings the following year for a combined $5.25 million, and in 2021, its stake in the warehouse was transferred to the partnership that sold the property last month, according to public records.
“The … seller spent a lot of (capital expenditure) to take it from a specialized dairy production facility with total refrigeration, steam generators, kind of very specific uses to … just industrial,” Bennis said.
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