"We had been leasing the space to another company, Burnham Service Co. Inc., and it went bankrupt," Dick Rudolph, who heads leasing for Etkin Johnson, tells GlobeSt.com. "Within five days after they rejected our lease, we had found Nationwide for the entire space at a very darn good market rate," Rudolph says.

Burnham had been around since the 1920s and had been in the building before Etkin Johnson--one of the largest and most aggressive local investors and developers of real estate--bought the building seven years ago, Rudolph says. "They weren't a new economy company," he notes. "They were an old company that warehoused equipment and supplies. If you were Xerox, and you bought a ton of coffee machines, for example, they would store it for you."

The Denver division had remained profitable, which was frustrating for local employees, he says. "They bought a local company three years ago, and then they filed for bankruptcy," Rudolph says.