ON THE MORNING OF MAY 1, 2021, DAVID PREBBLE’S PHONE RANG. HIS WIFE, SOUNDING SHAKY AND PANICKED, BEGGED HIM TO GET TO THEIR LARIMER SQUARE STOREFRONT.
During the night, a fire had broken out in the building and burned a neighboring business’ interior before firefighters were able to douse the flames at 3:36 a.m. But now, Veronica told her husband, the inside of Victoriana Antique and Fine Jewelry, the couple’s boutique specializing in 19th- and 20th-century estate and designer jewelry, smelled heavily of smoke.
The couple’s insurance company would eventually value the smoke damage in the shop at $60,000, but upon reaching the store that day, Prebble’s first instinct wasn’t to call his insurer; he wanted to get ahold of his property manager to find out why he hadn’t been alerted about the fire. By 10:30 a.m., no one from Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL)—the multinational corporation that now manages Larimer Square—had contacted him. When Prebble finally reached someone, the property manager said JLL was aware of the fire and had been trying to contact all affected Larimer Square tenants, including the owner of Victoriana.
“I said, ‘I’m the fucking tenant!’ ” Prebble says.
He was incredulous—especially after verifying that Larimer Square’s security office had his emergency contact information on file. On top of that, there was only one other tenant who operated a business adjacent to where the blaze had broken out. How difficult could it have been for anyone at JLL to reach him?
The more Prebble thought about it, though, the more he realized he shouldn’t have expected a high level of client care: In nearly five months, no one from JLL, nor the North Carolina–based investment firm Asana Partners, which had purchased Larimer Square for $92.5 million in December 2020 and hired JLL to be its property manager, had stepped into his shop to introduce themselves. He might not have noticed the inattention, Prebble says, had Larimer Square’s previous landlords and property managers not been so personable and communicative during the roughly two decades he and Veronica had operated Victoriana along the block.
Prebble says he’d had an inkling that the absentee style of management did not bode well for shops like his. The fire bolstered that belief. Grumbling among tenants that Asana Partners had been avoiding discussions about renewing leases or, in other cases, asking for rents that were as much as double what tenants had been paying didn’t inspire confidence, either. But not even Prebble imagined that, in the coming year, things would get so bad between him and the new owners that he’d decide to leave
