Colorado Springs has a new business center, purpose-built for aerospace and defense companies.

Located at 8470 Launch Point, just southeast of the Colorado Springs Airport, the 30+ acre business park will expand as time goes on and needs evolve. On Oct. 9, Cushman and Wakefield and Colorado Springs Commercial announced the opening of the new Colorado Aerospace Business Center.

The first building offers more than 84,000 square feet of class A industrial space, meaning it is considered a top-tier facility, according to trade groups. The building can hold four new tenants, each with a little over 20,000 square feet.

“We determined that the aerospace and Department of Defense contractor world was really underserved for modern industrial space,” said business center founder Brady Welsh.

While the business center is built with aerospace and defense contractors in mind, featuring a fiber-optic network with fiber redundancy, solar-ready construction and several shipping docks, to ease logistics, Welsh said it is open to any type of company.

The whole business center is something of a “leap of faith,” Welsh said. Where the Peak Innovation Park near the airport is a 1,600 acre plot where a business can build their facility to spec, the Aerospace Business Center offers what Welsh called “speculative warehouses.”

“If (a company) has just won a Department of Defense contract, they can’t wait 12-18 months to go build a building, they need to be in really quick,” he said. “We can have an office built out specific to their needs within three, four months… We’re ready to meet that speed to market need.”  

The location is also important. Not only is the business center less than 20 minutes from all the major military bases in Colorado Springs, it’s near workforce housing, he added.

This is another criteria businesses consider when weighing options of where to locate, Welsh said. Colorado Springs’ “explosive growth” in residential housing all around the site, at what Welsh said is a “good price point,” makes it even more attractive.

Many homes near the site are priced roughly on par with the region’s median sales price, according to the Pikes Peak Association of Realtors and Zillow listings in the area.

“Looking into the future, we can do a build-to-suit or additional spec projects from 20,000 square feet up to 200,000 square feet,” he said. “A goal would be to create somewhat of a collaborative business park of like-minded companies that may (or may not) work together.”