I can’t remember the train of thought that led me to this, but just recently I wondered what happened to the Wildlife Experience, a museum that used to be in Parker, Colorado. Despite living not far from there for a time, I never actually went. I knew they had opened the building up for college classes through CU, but was it still open?
It turns out it’s not. Around 2014, the original owners donated it to the University of Colorado, but CU had a really hard time adapting it for classroom space. Some of the rooms looked quite nice on Google Maps, but considering there were only about 300 students attending at that location, it’s easy to see why such a large space wasn’t feasible.
I didn’t deep dive the subject, and there’s only so much I can find on the internet, but here’s my theory: although the owners were uber-rich real estate moguls connected with ReMax, they took their passion hobby of biology too far and built an enormous museum that turned into a money pit. Nobody ever went there (hell, I didn’t), and it was bleeding cash. It rode off the hype for awhile, and managed to pull money from school field trips, but it was barely enough, and attendance continued to decline. After a decade of not really getting anywhere, they knew they had fucked up and it would be really difficult to sell the building, which was specifically designed as a museum, so although they were renting some of the space out to CU, the cash just wasn’t enough. That’s when they decided that if they donated the whole building, they could stop the bleeding and get a massive tax write-off, so they did.
It was probably a really, really nice building, and CU might have been sheepish to turn down such a generous offer. Besides, didn’t they want to expand their campus so people in South Denver could attend a physical location? But hardly anybody signed up, and what in the world do you do with all the animal exhibits? There’s only so many museums across the entire country who might want to buy any of that. Basically, they were stuck being curators to some extent, at the same time they were trying to run a school that nobody was attending. Then there was a pandemic, and the rest is history.
This may not be perfectly accurate, but I imagine it went something like that. You know it’s ugly when a whole campus is donated, gets named after the donors, and 5 or 6 year later the school is like, “Yeah, uh, about that…we’re going to sell the building”. It makes you think that the owners knew it was a bad deal to hold onto, so that sweet tax write off looked like a better deal. And when a tax write off is a better deal than keeping something, you better watch out if you plan to take possession of that thing.
Assuming this is somewhat accurate, what can we potentially learn from this?
First of all, managing enormous empty spaces costs a fortune. You may think owning a McMansion would be fun, and it probably is to some extent, but you’d better have the capital to pay the utility bills and maintenance, because those will destroy you.
Second of all, custom-building stuff can be problematic since the things that is built often can’t be reused in other ways. If you’re going to pump serious dollars into something, it’d be nice if the designated function can be changed or has multiple uses.
Third of all, just because it’s pretty doesn’t mean anybody wants it if it’s also high maintenance (a lesson for the single folk, no doubt).
And that, my friends, is why real estate doesn’t always pay.