After being a renter for 32 years, Pikes Peak Hospice & Palliative Care is becoming the owner of a building in southwest Colorado Springs that will serve as its permanent headquarters and set the stage for anticipated growth.

The nonprofit operation, the largest of the area’s six hospice organizations, will start moving Thursday from its space at St. Francis Health Center to the new site at 2550 Tenderfoot Hill Street. The new building will open Monday; no disruption to services for patients and families is anticipated.

“It’s very exciting,” president and CEO Martha Barton said Tuesday. “Over here at St. Francis, they’ve been very good to us, but for that amount of space to rent, we’re spending over $1 million a year, and that was fair market value. The rates being paid for hospice care are dropping, so we really need to stabilize all the business costs we can stabilize.”

Pikes Peak Hospice has been in the St. Francis Health Center since 1994, but the building’s owner announced about two years ago that it planned to shut it down in a cost-savings move, forcing hospice and other tenants to look for new space. Last year, hospice moved its inpatient unit to Penrose Hospital, where it continues to manage the program.

The new building is about 4,000 square feet larger than the space Pikes Peak Hospice occupies at St. Francis, but Barton said the biggest appeal is that it’s been tailored to suit the organization’s operations.

“We’ve done major renovations to that building to customize it for our needs as a business headquarters,” Barton said.

Hospice uses most of its office space for the business and planning side of its operations, including outpatient services. Most of the organization’s work is done in patients’ homes, or in nursing and assisted living facilities. But the building will house its specialized pharmacy, a counseling and grief center, education center and the Pikes Peak Hospice Foundation.

The organization is in the midst of a $7 million capital campaign to pay for the renovations of the inpatient unit at Penrose and the purchase and renovations of the new building.

The organization provides hospice care for about 250 families every day, Barton said. Another 200 are in palliative care. It has 240 full- and part-time employees.