Anthony Lanza is adding onto the construction noise of Colfax Avenue with his purchase of a retail building along the major Denver thoroughfare.

“We’re going to put the building back together,” he said.

Lanza is an executive with the Denver Recovery Group, a rehab center with 14 locations in the state, including two others on Colfax. Last week, the company purchased 4115 E. Colfax Ave., a 3,500-square-foot former bank building on a 0.9-acre lot, for $2.6 million, according to public records.

“It’s obviously been very compromised by the homeless and vagrants that were in there,” Lanza said. “They stole a bunch of the electrical and HVAC and plumbing out of the building, so we’re going to fix that and put the building back to a usable state, and at that point we’re going to decide what we’re going to do with it.”

Doug Antonoff, CEO of Denver real estate firm Antonoff & Co., told BusinessDen the property was sold by his family. Records show they bought it for $550,000 in 2009. Antonoff represented the family in the sale along with Jeff Hirschfeld of Antonoff & Co. Brokerage. He noted that his family had leased the ground for decades before making the purchase.

“It’s been hard to get it leased and (a) sale for redevelopment has been difficult,” Antonoff said.

The building’s condition coupled with the large lot it sits on would’ve made an apartment complex with some retail ideal, Antonoff said.

“But because of the city’s high threshold of affordable housing requirement(s), everybody who we talked to who’s in that business is not interested, because it just didn’t make economic sense,” he said.

In a past life, the building was home to a Compass Bank branch. That company was acquired by PNC Bank in 2021, and PNC shut down the location and bought out the lease. Antonoff said the closure was due to it being a “conflicting location” with other nearby PNC branches.

The empty building left ownership with something of a real estate quagmire. Gamble and hold, hoping for a big payday from a developer once the Colfax bus rapid transit, or BRT, project is completed? Or take what you can get now and free up that equity for another investment?

When another of Antonoff’s brokers, Charles Nusbaum, approached him about his rehab center client buying the building, ownership went with the latter option.

“I don’t know what that end date looks like,” Antonoff said of the Colfax BRT project.

“They (his family) were like: We’d rather start getting some cash flow. We’re sick of dealing with the city of Denver, and (let’s) move on to something else.”