1245 E Colfax Avenue
The corner of Colfax and Lafayette in City Park West has cycled through more drama in the past three years than most Denver parcels see in a decade. What started as a $9.3 million acquisition unraveled into litigation, unpaid architecture bills, and a lender-driven foreclosure. Now the 0.85-acre site is back on the market at $12 million with a new pitch: a fully entitled, permit-ready, 144-unit mixed-use development called Lofts on Colfax.
Greenwood Village-based Lead Funding took ownership through a foreclosure auction in the summer of 2024, placing an $8.5 million credit bid after borrower Leon Cisneros of CRE Development Investments defaulted on an $8 million loan. Cisneros had purchased the site in 2022 planning to build a five-story apartment complex on the surface lot behind the existing four-story office building. Those plans never broke ground. Before the foreclosure, Denver District Court ordered Cisneros to pay $183,000 to Oz Architecture over unpaid design work on the project.
Lead Funding CEO Victor Mitchell moved quickly after the auction, submitting plans to the city within weeks. The strategy: complete all entitlements and design work, then sell the shovel-ready package to a developer. That timeline appears to have arrived. The project is listed on Crexi and marketed through LoftsOnColfax.com, with Ken O'Donnell as listing broker.
The plan calls for two buildings. The Lafayette Building is a new five-story, 95-unit structure fronting Lafayette Street with a 24-stall parking garage at ground level, co-working space, a podcasting studio, rooftop patio, and 1,248 SF of ground-floor retail.
The Colfax Building is an adaptive reuse of the existing 1962 office structure into 49 micro-apartments with roughly 5,474 SF of activated retail frontage along Colfax, including an existing coffee shop tenant.
Across both buildings, the project delivers 144 apartments ranging from 415 to 547 square feet, approximately 6,000 SF of retail, and 35 vehicle parking stalls. The parking ratio of 0.24 stalls per unit leans heavily into the site's transit access along the RTD 15/15L corridor.
At $12 million, the ask works out to roughly $83,333 per door on acquisition alone, before a developer underwrites hard costs, soft costs, and carry. The micro-unit format is a bet on Denver's growing demand for smaller, more affordable rental product, but it requires lease-up assumptions that pencil at unit sizes well below 550 square feet.
The site's positioning has clear advantages: continued investment along the Colfax corridor, walkability to Cheesman Park, and reduced timeline risk from the adaptive reuse component. The open question is whether Lead Funding's entitle-and-flip strategy finds a buyer at this basis in the current capital markets environment. The project offers something unusual for Denver's pipeline: a genuinely shovel-ready infill play with entitlement risk already removed.