Robinhood Shelves Plan For Downtown Denver Office, Puts 120K SF Up For Sublease

It looks like Robinhood, the San Francisco-based financial services tech company, won’t be coming to Denver after all.

The firm, which has claimed it will “democratize finance” by letting customers buy no-commission stocks and cryptocurrency directly and which was fined $65M in 2020 by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misrepresenting its business model to its users, has listed for sublease its long-planned office at 1701 South Platte, the Denver Business Journal reports. 

Though Newmark’s Jamie Gard and Ben Stern, who are representing the current tenant, wouldn't confirm that Robinhood was the lessor, sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed to the Journal that it was Robinhood's space.

The company’s entire planned footprint — over 120K SF, representing the whole fourth and fifth floors of the building, which is known as Platte One — is now available. According to a marketing brochure, the 60K SF fourth floor can be subdivided into multiple units.

“We’d love to have one [tenant] but we’re expecting to have to break it up,” Gard told the Journal.

Newmark is marketing the space, which comes with access to building amenities like a 245-seat multipurpose room and a rooftop deck.

Robinhood first announced plans to open a satellite office in Denver in 2019, a development that seemed destined to bolster the Mile High City’s reputation as an emerging tech hub. The company planned to bring 800 jobs to the region and was poised to receive $9M in tax incentives from the Colorado Economic Development Commission if it made at least 791 hires in eight years. 

But pandemic-related changes in office culture, not to mention the company’s legal woes and a worsening general economy, likely make expansion less attractive, though Robinhood is far from the only company struggling to decide what to do with its downtown Denver office space. Total downtown office vacancy reached a high of 27% in Q3 2022, according to research from CBRE, almost double pre-pandemic levels.