One of the Intermountain West’s largest commercial brokerages is moving to the west side of Downtown Salt Lake City.
Newmark Mountain West announced Tuesday that it has acquired the Ford Building at 280 S. 400 West and will begin a $40 million renovation of the 1924 structure, which it plans to occupy in 2027 as the corporate headquarters for the firm and its subsidiary, Mountain West Strategic. The company says more than 320 people will work out of the building.
The purchase price was not disclosed. Public records show the sale was recorded on Aug. 24, when the Charlotte-based Asana Partners transferred the property to an entity controlled by Newmark Mountain West.
A deed of trust recorded the same day showed Mountain America Federal Credit Union lent $22.2 million toward the building.
The move takes the firm off South Temple, where it currently headquarters at 312 E. South Temple, and drops it into the Depot District a few blocks south of the Delta Center and the sports and entertainment district being assembled around it.
“This investment in the Ford Building and west downtown Salt Lake City is part of our ongoing efforts to better serve the clients and community that have been so good to us,” Chad Moore, chairman of Newmark Mountain West’s board, said in a statement. Moore said the firm has grown at a rate exceeding 100% per year since 2024.
The deal is also a piece of Downtown office absorption worth noting.
The two-level, roughly 90,000-square-foot building had been on the market for lease through JLL at $30 per square foot, with about half the building sitting vacant. An owner-user buying the whole thing and filling it with 320 employees removes that vacancy from a Downtown office market that has spent the last several years working through it.
The Ford Building was built in 1924 as Ford Motor Company’s regional sales, service, distribution and assembly facility. Components arrived by rail, cars were assembled on site, and the finished vehicles were sold from a showroom in the same building — an arrangement state historians described as unmatched by any other automaker.
It was designed by Albert Kahn, the Detroit architect who defined American industrial building in the first half of the 20th century, and it is his only known work in the Intermountain West. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
Ford operated out of the building until roughly 1970. Envirotech Corp. bought it in 1971 for research and development, and Gastronomy Inc. acquired it in 1996 and led the renovation that converted it into the creative office space it has been since.
Newmark Mountain West’s renovation would add a 250-person lecture hall and amphitheater, a gym, locker rooms, a media production studio, a game room, a golf simulator, and pickleball and basketball courts, plus a patio and barbecue area.
The firm did not say what it plans to do with those parcels.
Newmark Mountain West is an independently owned member of the Newmark Licensee Group, operating in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming and Montana under the platform of publicly traded Newmark Group.
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