Zeppelin is back at Zeppelin Station.
Kyle Zeppelin, CEO of Denver-based Zeppelin Development, and partners Neil Adam and Jason Kaplan took back the keys to the RiNo office building on Thursday.
“We’re not looking to do that again anytime soon,” he said, standing outside the building’s now-empty food hall.
That was losing control of the building for two years, after a judge appointed a receiver to oversee the building at the request of Wells Fargo. The ownership group, operating as RiNo TOD LLC, took out a $32 million loan from Wells Fargo in 2019, a year after completing the building.
Plenty of Denver-area office buildings have gone into receivership due to loan defaults in the wake of the pandemic. But Zeppelin, a major RiNo developer, and his partners have been the only ones to fight back tooth and nail.
The court battle began in March 2024, when Wells Fargo said Zeppelin had defaulted on the building loan by failing to meet a specified income-to-debt ratio. Zeppelin countersued, saying it hadn’t missed a payment and the “technical defaults” that Wells Fargo objected to resulted from concessions given to food hall tenants during the pandemic.
The litigation was settled this past March, on the eve of trial.
That settlement gave Zeppelin until mid-July to pay off Wells Fargo’s loan at what he called a “substantial discount.”
That payoff happened last week. Records show the ownership group took out a new $13 million loan from Farmers & Merchants Bank, which has two branches in Berlin, Wisconsin.
“We appreciate their working with us at getting the deal done and allowing us to move forward,” Adam said of Wells Fargo.
Zeppelin Station, at 3501 Wazee St., is a four-story, 100,000-square-foot building. Its ground-floor food hall, which began reeling when the pandemic hit, died completely during receivership. A deal the receiver struck with a local operator planning to bring in animatronic dinosaurs fell apart before a single dinosaur arrived.
Kyle Zeppelin said getting the first floor going again is a top priority — it’s a key amenity for the office users above. He hopes to get a coffee shop up and running within weeks.
Beyond that, it’s more up in the air.
“I don’t know that it will exist in that same form,” he said of the food hall era.
He plans to turn part of the space into a fitness center. He still wants to have food stalls, likely between two and six, and is open to pop-ups or having one operator run multiple concepts. And he’s more interested in solid lunch options than being a nighttime hot spot.
The upper floors of Zeppelin Station are office space, which Zeppelin said is about 70% leased. Some 40,000 square feet is leased to Alterra Mountain Co., which operates ski resorts including Winter Park and Steamboat and sells the multimountain Ikon Pass.
The firm has been eyeing office space elsewhere. It looked closely at the 16 Chestnut building downtown and then was close to signing a lease at Steel House, an office building farther down Brighton Boulevard, according to real estate sources. But the interest in Steel House petered out around the time that CEO Jared Smith stepped down in the spring, sources say.
Zeppelin said Alterra has three years left on its lease at Zeppelin Station, although the firm can pay an “expensive buyout” to get out early.
“I have a lot of confidence we’ll be able to keep them,” he said. “And if there’s an audible we’ll deal with that.”
The vacant units in the building are all built out with desks and chairs.
“We could move people in very quickly,” Adam said.
Adam bought the site where Zeppelin Station now sits in 2010, bought his partners out in 2013 and retained a stake when he sold it to Zeppelin and Kaplan in 2015.
After that, he said, he was a passive investor in Zeppelin Station. But, in the wake of the receivership ending, he is now actively involved.
“No one takes care of your building like you do,” Adam said.
