Ulysses Development Group has signed a lease for a 21,000-square-foot office at 250 Fillmore Street in Cherry Creek, marking the affordable housing developer's fourth expansion in five years as it scales a business now spanning nearly a dozen states. The company, which began with six employees crammed into a windowless basement office at 210 University Boulevard, has grown to 60 employees and needed more room to keep up with its pace of growth.
Co-founder Yoni Gruskin told The Denver Post that the company's current office setup combines multiple spaces, a patchwork that no longer fits a firm of Ulysses' size. Ulysses currently occupies 16,000 square feet spread across the second and fourth floors of 210 University Boulevard, and co-founder Connor Larr said the new office is important to the company's ability to succeed and scale. The firm expects the 250 Fillmore Street space to accommodate it for the full 10-year term of the lease, and nearly all of its employees work in the office five days a week.
Why Cherry Creek, Not Downtown
Ulysses wanted to remain in Cherry Creek even as it searched for more space, but the neighborhood is not an easy place to find room to grow. Cherry Creek has tight office space and high rents, and commercial real estate data from CBRE reported by the Denver Gazette showed the district's office vacancy rate dropped below 13% in the first quarter of 2026, compared to nearly 39% vacancy downtown. Within Cherry Creek North specifically, the Cherry Creek Alliance's “State of Cherry Creek” report found vacancy fell to just 1.3% in 2025, according to reporting from The Villager, even as the district now supports more than 16,800 workers across 1,694 businesses.
The building Ulysses chose has its own pedigree. The seven-story, 116,187-square-foot Civica Cherry Creek office tower was built in 2018 by developer Schnitzer West after older retail properties on the site were demolished, per the Denver Business Journal, and it sold for $108 million in September 2021 to an asset management entity affiliated with MetLife Inc. A commercial listing from JLL in July 2026 noted the tower was 93% leased and had averaged only about 4% vacancy since it opened, underscoring just how competitive the building's remaining space has become. Ulysses is taking over third-floor space previously occupied by Spaces, and the company says it passed on leasing in a planned or under-construction office building elsewhere because of the timing uncertainty that comes with buildings not yet finished.
From a Basement to a Nationwide Pipeline
Ulysses was founded by Gruskin, 37, and Larr, 38, who met in New York City during their first year out of college and later worked together as analysts in Citibank's municipal bond division before both landing at Related Companies. Gruskin focused on income-restricted housing at Related, while Larr worked on large mixed-use projects there. Gruskin began laying the groundwork for Ulysses in late 2020, and the company takes its name from the Alfred Tennyson poem — Gruskin has quoted the poem's line, “'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
The firm has built 2,700 apartments to date and is developing or planning roughly 3,000 more, with Gruskin attributing the company's growth to nationwide demand for income-restricted housing. Ulysses works with a third-party property management company to run its completed complexes and is active in nearly a dozen states, requiring larger teams to match the scale and pace of its work. In Denver, the company is developing a multiphase project at the Central Park Station Park-n-Ride lot, a plan made possible after a 2024 Colorado law change removed a requirement that the Regional Transportation District sell surplus land at market value, allowing RTD's board to enter exclusive negotiations with Ulysses to build up to 900 affordable units there, as CBS News Colorado reported at the time.
Projects Stretching From Broomfield to Reno
Closer to its new headquarters, Ulysses is building the 152-unit Harvest Hill project in Broomfield, which will reserve several apartments for people with intellectual disabilities. The project secured more than $33 million in public and private financing, including over $20 million in federal tax credits and $4.8 million in state tax credits, according to Mile High CRE, and is scheduled for completion in spring 2027. The Colorado Division of Housing also awarded Ulysses a $1.75 million grant in May 2026 for The Approach, a planned 153-unit rental community in Denver County.
The developer's reach extends well beyond Colorado's Front Range. In Eagle, Colorado, Ulysses purchased and renovated a 120-unit complex — reopened this month after a $69 million overhaul — spending $90,000 per unit on renovations and renewing income restrictions on a building that represents half of the town's income-restricted housing stock for an additional 60 years, after the property's original 30-year covenants nearly expired. In Phoenix, Ulysses has reserved a handful of units for women escaping domestic violence or sex trafficking, and in Orlando, the company received a $7 million grant from Orange County's Affordable Housing Trust Fund to build a 100-unit senior housing project. Most recently, Ulysses closed financing in January 2026 on The Prospector Apartments, a 136-unit development in downtown Reno backed by more than $28 million in tax-exempt bonds from the Nevada Housing Division.
Back in Cherry Creek, the company's expansion adds to a broader pattern of firms competing for scarce office space in the district, following AI company Crusoe's move into a new Cherry Creek tower earlier this year and a proposed five-story office building pitched for a corner along South Colorado Boulevard. For Ulysses, the new Fillmore Street office represents an attempt to finally settle into a space built to match a company that has outgrown its Cherry Creek footprint four times over in just five years, with plans to keep adding more services to its growing roster of buildings.
