LowDown on Uptown

Goodbye, condo mania ........the titles write themselves these days, this from MSN Real Estate

2006-08-03T13:39:00.000-06:00

Goodbye, condo mania
Buyers are getting better deals as the froth fizzles and sellers offer concessions. And the glut is likely to get worse.By Pat Mertz Esswein, Kiplinger's
Condo prices near you
What's ahead for housing?
Apartment rents are on the rise
Buy your college kid a condo?
Condo owners, who had been cruising along propelled by double-digit price gains, are encountering cooler currents and the prospect of perilous waters ahead.
The supply of existing condos for sale increased by almost two-thirds during the year that ended in April. At the same time, sales fell slightly, according to the National Association of Realtors. Investors -- about one-third of all condo owners, according to mortgage-data tracker LoanPerformance -- have been fleeing like proverbial rats.
Sale prices of existing condos have fallen a bit, too. At $222,000, the nationwide median price of a condo is once again less than that of a single-family home ($222,700). Condos had been appreciating more quickly than single-family homes because they are concentrated in high-cost metro areas, where prices were rising rapidly. As home prices cool in overheated urban markets, the drop in condo prices is likely to be more precipitous. (Check out condo prices where you live.)
Even more ominous: Over the next two years, "a tsunami of new units will swamp the market," reports the National Association of Home Builders (NAR). Conversions of rental apartments to condos are adding to the glut.
Don't panicAlthough the median price of a condo rose nearly 14% last year, double-digit increases appear to be a thing of the past. The NAR expects prices to rise 3% to 4% in 2006 (compared with 6% for single-family homes). And the outlook varies by region. Condo owners in the Midwest, concentrated in the Twin Cities and Chicago, probably have the least to worry about. The South and West have taken the biggest hits. Sales there have fallen 14% in the past year, and prices are lower, too.
In the Northeast, it's a mixed bag. Sales have slowed a little but prices are 4% higher. In Boston and other markets, real estate agents say the market for lower-priced condos (under about $400,000) is still relatively tight and demand is strong. But at the high end, the bidding wars are over and there's more give-and-take between buyers and sellers.
Andrew Terrat found the market cooling when he listed his luxury condo in Boston's South End for sale last October. For several years, Terrat, an interior decorator, had been riding the wave of price appreciation by buying and renovating condos and then trading up. He bought his current apartment in 2004 for more than $900,000 and listed it for $1.4 million in October.
Buyers showed little interest, so Terrat took it off the market and used the time to transform a home office into a guest bedroom. In February, he put it back on the market; instead of reducing the price, he threw in his Bang & Olufsen audio system. By May, he'd found a buyer.
In Miami, the market is less favorable for sellers, but a better deal for buyers. The city had three times as much inventory on the market this spring as last, and there's more in the pipeline. "Most developers thought that speculators weren't going to stop buying," says housing analyst Jack McCabe, of Deerfield Beach, Fla.
At the NAR, senior economist Lawrence Yun expects demand from baby boomers to strengthen as more of them approach retirement age over the next five to 10 years. McCabe counters that one more bad hurricane could change boomers' migratory patterns, causing them to avoid Florida and wing their way to places such as Tennessee, Texas and western North Carolina.
Sellers: Send up a flareIf you're selling a condo, above all, price it right. Real estate agents in condo-crazed cities such as Boston, Miami and Phoenix agree that much of the slowdown is at the high end of the market and that more affordable units are selling well. Whatever the price point, it's not smart to be selling the most expensive apartment on the block, says Boston agent Ken Tutunjian. And with so many opportunities for buyers, you need to make your unit stand out over the competition, says Phoenix agent Brad Brauer. Clean your condo, remove clutter and stage it perfectly.
Be prepared to negotiate. Miami agent Troy Fowler says that a year ago, sellers took a "don't bother me unless you're prepared to pay full price" attitude. Now, many condo ads say sellers are "motivated" and encourage buyers to "make an offer." Incentives can also bring in buyers -- such as a year's worth of condo fees or a flat-screen TV. In Miami, Fowler has seen listings offering a $5,000 or $10,000 bonus to the agent who brings in the buyer.
Finally, get the deal done. "Don't hold out for a slightly better offer," says Ron Witten of Dallas, a housing-market consultant.
Buyers: Take the long viewIn most markets, this is as good a time as any to buy. But in the riskiest ones, especially in the Southwest and Florida, it might be wise to wait a year to see how things shake out. Don't worry too much about higher mortgage rates. The risk of falling prices, says Witten, is greater than the risk of higher rates. (Kiplinger's expects rates to be slightly higher by year-end.) And forget about a quick flip. If you buy, plan to own the property for at least three to five years.
Which units will hold their value over the long run? Look for condos with a great view and easy access to parking, public transportation, necessities and amenities. High-priced gas may enhance the appeal of properties located close to downtown or to employment centers. To attract empty nesters, look for spacious, open-floor-plan condos in buildings with an elevator and, in cold climates, garage parking. In some luxury markets, buildings with a doorman or concierge are becoming highly desirable.
Take your time. Visit properties more than once. Drive a hard bargain and protect yourself with appropriate contingencies.

Haven't heard much about the proposed Park and the 2500 McKinney Avenue Project from SNK lately........hmmm

2006-08-03T12:01:00.000-06:00

Legal 'perfect storm' could cast pall on Dallas' condo boom

2006-08-01T10:17:00.000-06:00

Lawsuit enmeshes Vendome
Experts: Legal 'perfect storm' could cast pall on Dallas' condo boom
Dallas Business Journal - July 28, 2006
by Conrad Wilson and Christine Perez
Staff Writers
The Vendome on Turtle Creek, one of the first luxury high-rise condominium projects to hit the Dallas scene a few years ago, commanded prices as high as $4.5 million per unit.
Now, in a lawsuit filed against the developer, general contractor and real estate agent, the project's Homeowners Association is seeking millions of dollars in damages for alleged construction defects and other issues.
Complaints range from the aesthetic, such as lobby décor that's not quite up to snuff, to the potentially dangerous, such as water leaks in the elevator pits. In the spring of 2004, court documents say, an elevator inspection revealed rusted and corroded elevator ropes -- but not before one of the elevators fell two floors and injured a woman who'd just returned from her husband's funeral.
The Vendome case has dragged on since it was first filed in 2004. It was scheduled to go to trial in late August, but last week was moved into arbitration.
Industry experts say the $90 million Vendome is hardly alone. Virtually every residential condo project built in Dallas over the last couple of years is involved or has been involved in litigation, they say. HOA lawsuits, described as "epidemic" in high-growth areas such as California and Las Vegas, are rapidly becoming a major concern in Dallas' emerging condo market, too.
Plaintiff attorneys who have found success in California and Arizona are moving into Texas, offering free inspections to HOAs, sources say. "It's really becoming a mill, its own industry," one developer representative said.
"There are 24 projects under construction in Dallas," said Joe Bryant with Dallas-based McLaughlin Brunson Insurance, which provides risk-management services and insurance to architects, engineers and environmental consultants. "A perfect storm is brewing."
The 4-year-old, 21-story Vendome, modeled after the Hotel de Vendome near the Louvre in Paris, sits at the corner of Lemmon Avenue and Turtle Creek Boulevard in one of the most exclusive areas of Uptown.
Inside, the Vendome's units are appointed with hardwood floors, marble bathrooms, granite countertops and custom cabinetry. Outside, fountains gurgled the other day while a small army of gardeners worked to coax the ivy to grow, despite the sweltering summer heat.
The garden is among the homeowners association's complaints. Residents say the landscaping is failing to thrive, due to the use of wrong soils and inefficient drainage systems. They put the cost of developing the formal European gardens they were promised at $750,000.
Other complaints involve the building's heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, drainage issues, soundproofing and waterproofing defects and a poorly designed fountain that often sprays residents at the porte-cochere entrance.
Both sides agree there are no concerns about the building's structural integrity.
In early 2004, New York-based Vendome Partners L.P. -- a joint venture between New York's Metropolitan Development Group, which developed the Dallas Vendome, and Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. -- made some of the requested repairs and gave the HOA $153,000 for others. According to the HOA, the cost to make additional fixes and improvements will run more than $4 million.
Besides the construction issues, the HOA also is charging Vendome Partners and Dallas Realtor Judy Pittman with deceptive trade practices, saying they were promised a state-of-the-art security system, wrought-iron railing on the roof, a climate-controlled wine cellar and other amenities that were never delivered. Counterclaim filed
The HOA is asking for $4 million from Vendome and Oklahoma-based Manhattan Construction Co. and $2 million from Pittman, plus other damages, court costs and attorneys fees.
Numerous condo owners were contacted for this story; all declined to be interviewed. In a 2004 letter to residents, the HOA asked owners to "exercise the utmost discretion in any conversations they may have regarding the delicate situation," to help "preserve the value of individual properties and the reputation of the building."
Manhattan, which calls the HOA lawsuit frivolous, is no slouch when it comes to condo construction. Besides the Vendome, the company built the $28 million second phase of The Plaza at Turtle Creek and is at work on the Ritz Carlton Hotel & Residences, a 21-story, $200 million development in Uptown. It also was recently selected as general contractor for the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington.
Manhattan filed a counterclaim earlier this year, asking for a clarification with regard to warranties, as its contract was with the Vendome developer, not the HOA.
The HOA took ownership of the Vendome's common areas in October 2003. Representatives say they brought the lawsuit only after being unable to directly resolve issues with Vendome Partners.
In mid-2004, the HOA hired Deborah Gagliardi to do an independent evaluation of the project. A principal at the locally based Gagliardi Group, she is a registered architect and mechanical professional engineer licensed in the state of Texas.
According to documents filed with the Dallas County District Court, Gagliardi found 47 issues that needed to be resolved.
Vendome Partners' attorney, Cynthia Dooley with Dallas-based Brousseau & Associates, said her client has different positions on the various complaints. She declined to provide more specifics, due to the pending litigation. The HOA's attorney also declined to be interviewed, as did Pittman.
In an affidavit, one HOA board member described a contentious meeting with Vendome Partners' John Conroy. The member said Conroy "vigorously disagreed" with the group's observations and said he would not be "writing any big checks" to resolve the issue. The meeting ended with Conroy vowing to "get on a plane to New York and never return to Texas."
Carolyn Shamis, one of the top residential Realtors in Dallas, said that's indicative of the problem. "What happens is, as the buildings don't sell out, the developer gets tired of it and things get shoved under the rug and don't get fixed," she said. "They try to stall and get the HOA to pay for things. They're carrying notes and don't want to spend any more money, so they just stop." A lot of expectations
Arbitration regarding the Vendome situation is slated for March 2007. The outcome will be binding only between the HOA and Vendome Partners. Attorneys say that if the HOA gets a judgment against the developer, the developer will go after the construction company, which in turn will go after subcontractors. Fourteen subcontractors already have been brought into the matter; one of them, Americast L.L.C., has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.
From a risk-management perspective, condominiums differ from apartments or commercial projects because, once the condos are sold, the developer is out of the picture, turning over ownership of all common areas to a homeowner's association, which becomes responsible for maintenance and repairs. Because condos typically are sold before they're built, buyers often make decisions based on renderings and a vision. With multiple owners, there are a lot of expectations. In Texas, if just two or more unit owners are unhappy, HOAs have the right to pursue litigation.
Don Neff, president of Irvine, Calif.-based La Jolla Pacific, a third-party quality assurance services firm, said the Vendome exemplifies the typical HOA lawsuit. His company just opened a Dallas office. "We've been living with this for the last 10 years in California," he said. There, he said, insurance companies left the state, as they were suffering $3 to $4 in settlement losses for every $1 they collected. As a result, the condo-construction market went flat. Carriers have recently returned, this time with new insurance policies that require builders to "bleed with them," Neff said.
Under the old model, "the plaintiff's attorneys stand on the sidelines and watch the defendants duke it out," he said. "Whoever is left standing, the HOA collects from."
The new model, called a wrap insurance policy, simplifies things by bringing the insurance company, the developer and all subcontractors under one policy; all are represented by the same attorneys and all are financially responsible for any litigation that may occur.
Wrap-policy premiums are much higher. Ten to 15 years ago, a $1 million policy might have cost $20,000 or $30,000. The same coverage today will cost $650,000 to $800,000, Neff said.
Mike Puls, with Dallas-based multifamily and condo consultancy Foley & Puls Inc., said HOA lawsuits already have had a dramatic effect on insurance costs for developers. "And without a good insurance policy, they won't get financing from banks," he said.
HOA lawsuits will continue to proliferate, he said, because it's difficult to satisfy large groups of people.
"When you get a number of buyers in the same building, some will get bored and go looking for flaws," he said. "Or if a new building goes up, they'll ask, 'Why isn't ours as good as that one?' "
Staff writers Chad Eric Watt and Cynthia D. Webb contributed to this report.
cwilson@bizjournals.com 214-706-7118 and cperez@bizjournals.com 214-706-7120

Slow market kills Uptown condos

2006-08-01T10:14:00.000-06:00

Slow market kills Uptown condos
Maple Terrace planners cite disappointing sales in halting project
12:00 AM CDT on Tuesday, July 25, 2006
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
Developers have canceled plans for a high-profile Uptown condo deal.

FILE 2000/Staff photoHigh Street Residential plans to continue renting the Maple Terrace building as apartments.
Trammell Crow Co. has halted efforts to construct condominiums in Dallas' historic Maple Terrace building and develop an adjoining high-rise because sales did not meet expectations.
The $87 million project was to have included 68 homes in the landmark Maple Avenue building, plus 170 more units in a new 16-story tower. The first condos were to have been ready next year.
With units starting at just over $200,000, the Maple Terrace was more moderately priced than other Uptown high-rise projects.
But last week developer High Street Residential, a division of Trammell Crow, began notifying buyers in the Maple Terrace that the condo development is dead.
The owners plan to continue renting the building as apartments, said Art Lomenick, managing director of High Street Residential.
"The condominium and apartment markets are very different from what they were a year ago, and the partners have made a strategic decision to operate the property as a luxury apartment community," he said in a statement.
The Maple Terrace is the latest and largest Dallas-area condominium project to be canceled.
Earlier this year developer Fairfield Residential pulled the plug on an Addison condo project after pre-sales failed to meet expectations.
Two other condominium conversions – one on Turtle Creek and another in North Dallas – were canceled last year.
Developer Mockingbird Properties has gone back to the drawing board for its Galleria North condominium tower in Far North Dallas. The developer is now studying hotel plans.
Construction is under way on a handful of luxury condo towers in central Dallas.
More buildings are in presales but have not been started.
With rising construction costs and higher mortgage rates, real estate analysts say they will be surprised if all the condo projects planned get built.
"It's typical of what is happening in a lot of markets and has happened earlier in other markets than Dallas," said Ron Witten of Witten Advisors. "The underlying demand for condos is strong and will stay strong for some time, but we have a little bit of oversupply nationally."
But the number of investors in the condo market has declined dramatically, said Mike Puls with Foley & Puls.
"That was the market spending the most amount of money per square foot," he said. "Even if you have a good location and a good developer, if you target the wrong market they won't show up."
The 81-year-old Maple Terrace has long been a Dallas landmark.
But several redevelopment plans – including one to convert the building to a luxury hotel – have not gone forward.
Designed by British architect Alfred Blossom, the Maple Terrace has about 80 units that over the years attracted visiting celebrities and local luminaries.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

JUAN GUAJARDO/DMN

2006-07-28T15:12:00.000-06:00

Condo Update

2006-07-28T15:06:00.000-06:00

Condo market has ups, downs
Some projects still hot, but market may have hit its peak
09:05 AM CDT on Friday, July 28, 2006
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
Dallas' high-rise condo boom appears to be peaking.
With construction costs soaring and investors pulling out of the housing market, several residential tower deals have been killed and others are in doubt.

"Construction costs have risen a lot faster than sales prices of condominiums," said Jonas Woods, president of Victory developer Hillwood Capital. "That's why you are seeing some of these projects get canceled."
Developers of the 16-story Maple Terrace condominium project last week shut down sales, which hadn't hit targets.
"In the last 45 days it really started to get some momentum, but sales at the kickoff were a bit disappointing," said Art Lomenick, managing director of developer High Street Residential.
"A lot of folks are stepping back and looking at their options because of what is going on in the market."
What's going on is that investors – many of them from out of state – are abandoning the housing market.
Economists and builders credit the investor pullback with causing most of the nationwide downturn in home sales this year.
The declines have been worse in markets such as California, Florida and Las Vegas, where dozens of condominium deals have been canceled because of slumping demand.
Investors have accounted – by some estimates – for more than a third of local condo presales.
On the way
In the Dallas area, there are already plenty of high-rise condo projects under construction, and a couple more will start soon.
Seven towers now being built in Uptown and downtown will have almost 1,000 units.
A half-dozen buildings in presales will add 600 more condos.
Two of those buildings are set to start next month.
The 28-story House by Philippe Starck is located in the Victory complex and will have 150 condos – most of which have been sold, the developers say.
"Our loan closing is imminent, and that's the only thing we are waiting for," Mr. Woods said.
Prescott Realty Group also plans to break ground next month on its 21-story Stoneleigh Hotel and Residences project on Maple Avenue.
"We are finishing construction documents and will break ground at the end of August," said Prescott president Jud Pankey.
Not so sure
But other developers are rethinking their deals.
Mockingbird Properties has stopped marketing its 20-story Galleria North condominium tower in Far North Dallas and is negotiating with a hotel operator, said developer Mitchell Vexler.
"We were approached by a hotel group from Europe that has been trying to do a deal here," Mr. Vexler said.
"We had pretty good traffic with our condo sales, but we weren't lighting the world on fire.
"The market is starting to cool a little bit."
If the hotel company decides to build on the Noel Road site, the project would have about 78 condos – far fewer than the 126 units originally planned.
Another Far North Dallas condo tower, the 80-unit Amalfi project on Montfort Road, is at a turning point, said builder Mickey Munir.
The developers are negotiating with a new financial partner that would start the building without more presales.
"Selling something coming out of the ground is easier than selling something that might be coming out of the ground," Mr. Munir said.
"If this works out, we will start it."

Luxury winning out
Buildings that offer luxury hotels – like the W, which opens its residential units in August – have fared better, said real estate analyst Mike Puls.
"The world-class high-rise projects work just fine," Mr. Puls said.
The Ritz-Carlton project under construction on McKinney Avenue recently announced plans for a second 70-unit tower.
And construction is already under way in Victory on 90 condominiums in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel tower.
But Mr. Puls agrees that the investors have for the most vanished and the remaining buyers are savvy to the market.
"You can't bamboozle them," he said. "You have to have the product at the price structure they want."
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

DALLAS HIGH-RISE CONDO PROJECTS UPDATE
UNDER CONSTRUCTION

W Dallas Victory Hotel & Residences
33 stories, 144 units, opens in August

Residences at Hotel Palomar
10 stories, 72 units, opens fall 2006

Residences at the Ritz-Carlton
21 stories, 70 units, opens fall 2007

One Arts Plaza
24 stories, 71 units, opens 2007

The Metropolitan
26 stories, 283 units, opens 2007

Azure
31 stories, 202 units, opens 2008

Mandarin Oriental at Victory
43 stories, 90 units, opens 2009

IN PRESALES

Stoneleigh Hotel and Residences
21 stories, 97 units, opens spring 2008

The House by Philippe Starck
28 stories, 150 units, opens 2008

Tower Residences at the Ritz-Carlton
23 stories, 96 units, opens 2008

Cresta Bella
22 stories, 55 residences, opens mid-2008

Amalfi
11 stories, 80 units

Museum Tower
20 stories, 125 units, opens 2008.

ON HOLD

Galleria North
20 stories, 126 units, project in redesign

CANCELED

Maple Terrace condominiums
16 stories, 238 units

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

Housing slows..more apartments in uptown and another big office sale

2006-07-28T09:31:00.000-06:00

Steve Brown:Builders cautious about future sales
But Texas, Southwest are showing strength, Horton and Centex say
11:06 PM CDT on Thursday, July 27, 2006
Misery loves company – the old saying goes.

And news in the last week about setbacks for local homebuilders found a wide audience.
First in line to spread word of woes was D.R. Horton Inc., which slashed its earnings estimates, then said it was dropping $57 million to get out of land purchase deals.
Horton officials blamed a rapidly cooling single-family home market – particularly on the West Coast – for its financial setback.
Then this week, Centex Corp. chimed in with its own 31 percent drop in earnings and a $36 million write-off for canceled land deals.
The Centex and Horton disclosures only confirmed what housing economists have been warning for months: Some of the country's overheated housing markets have turned cold.
If there was any good news from these big builders' reports it was that their home sales in the Southwest and Texas are still increasing.
Horton's Texas sales were up 20 percent in the most recent quarter, while Centex saw a 6 percent increase in its Southwest region sales, which includes Texas.
"There are significant differences in markets today," said Centex CEO Tim Eller.
"The Carolinas, Texas and the Pacific Northwest are showing strength."
In California, where sales are spiraling, Mr. Eller blames investors who have bolted from the market.
But even in stronger markets like Texas, builders would be smart to cut back on spec construction and not to count on continued strong sales.
Horton CEO Don Tomnitz had the most insightful comment on the situation.
"Every time we've gone into a downturn in the homebuilding industry, they've always been longer and deeper than we've imagined," Mr. Tomnitz warned analysts last week in a conference call.
Indeed, history shows that's always the case with real estate downturns.
And while North Texas may not be suffering from a real estate price bubble, a sharp drop in home sales can pull the rug out from under the best market.

Fitzhugh apartments
One of the country's biggest apartment builders is working on an in-town Dallas deal.
Trammell Crow Residential has contracted to purchase a development site on Fitzhugh Avenue just east of North Central Expressway.
The location is a block from FirstWorthing's new Cityville rental community.
Crow Residential has already put in a zoning request for the apartment community it plans to build there.

Premier Place
A CB Richard Ellis investment fund has completed its purchase of the 20-story Premier Place office building on North Central Expressway in Dallas.
Located next door to the Mockingbird Station shopping center, Premier Place was sold by Cornerstone Real Estate Advisors, an affiliate of Massachusetts Mutual Insurance Co.
The 400,000-square-foot glass office tower was built in 1986.
Andrew Levy and Todd Savage with Holiday Fenoglio Fowler negotiated the sale with Gary Carr with CB Richard Ellis.

Very Superstitious.....writing on the wall

2006-07-28T09:27:00.000-06:00

Steve Brown:A lot of high-rises have something missing
Many skip the 13th floor so they don't scare off superstitious buyers
01:14 PM CDT on Friday, July 21, 2006
Downtown Dallas' Metropolitan condominium tower will have a swimming pool, a fitness center and a private movie theater.
About all that's missing from the 283-unit condo project under construction at 1200 Main St. is the 13th floor.
The developers planned it that way.
Worried that superstitious buyers might come down with a case of triskaidekaphobia, owner Rockwood Realty Associates decided to leave out the 13th floor in the $50 million condo conversion.
"We have sometimes found buyer resistance to living on a floor marked 13 and therefore made a decision to eliminate using that number," said Rockwood's Keith Walker.
Builders have been avoiding the number 13 for decades.
And more than 80 percent of the world's skyscrapers don't have a 13th floor, according to reports attributed to the Otis Elevator Co.
Dallas high-rise developers have a mixed view of the dreaded number.
The planned House by Philippe Starck condo tower in the Victory area will have a 13th floor with seven units.
So will the Residences at the Ritz-Carlton.
But developers of the planned Museum Tower in Dallas' Arts District will pass on the niggling number.
"I don't think I would support having a 13th floor," said developer John Sughrue.
If all this worry about a floor number sounds silly, consider that fear of the number 13 has been around since ancient times. The Vikings considered it an unlucky number, and Christians point out that Judas was the 13th dinner guest at the Last Supper.
Of course, there are plenty of other unlucky digits.
In Asian cultures, the number 4 is feared and is left out of many building addresses and floors.
In Italy, it's 17 that's a turnoff – some foolishness about Roman numerals spelling death. Whatever.
I guess you can't blame developers for playing it safe with dodgy numbers.
With all the hurdles that projects face these days, the last thing a builder needs to worry about is superstition.
And who's to say the Vikings weren't right?
3,300-acre purchase
Arizona-based developer Aperion Cos. has contracted for another big land purchase in North Texas.
The company – which already has land near Rockwall, north of Fort Worth and near Terrell – is buying another large tract south of Denton.
Aperion is purchasing the 3,300-acre Hunters Ranch property on Interstate 35W from developer Hillwood.
"We are just in the escrow period and are working with the city of Denton and have filed for our zoning," said Aperion chief executive David Maniatis.
Aperion has already purchased 2,660 acres northwest of the Texas Motor Speedway from Hillwood for its planned Tradition development.
Hello, Dallas
A California investor has purchased a Farmers Branch office building.
Hager Pacific Properties bought the 1801 Valley View Lane building from Levitt Properties Trust. The acquisition was part of a $48 million portfolio that includes buildings in Chicago and Salt Lake City.
The 209,000-square-foot Farmers Branch building was built in 1986 and is occupied by Cingular Wireless. The two-story building is on 14 acres.
The purchase marks Hager Pacific's first investment in the Dallas area. Hager Pacific owns properties mostly in California and the Midwest.
El Paso a haven
Nervous Nellies, take note.
The safest place in the country when it comes to avoiding natural disasters is – no joke – El Paso.
Actually, El Paso ties with Milwaukee, Cleveland and three cities in Arizona as the best place to dodge an earthquake, hurricane or such in a survey by Internet company Sustainlane.com and Risk Management Solutions.
That's right, no hurricane threat in EP. Well, duh, it's only about 800 miles to the ocean.
Other things not to worry about in El Paso are "major flooding, catastrophic hail, tornado super-outbreaks," according to the report that dropped in my mailbox this week.
The highest-risk places to live are Miami, New Orleans and the San Francisco Bay area – no surprise.
So why are real estate values in Miami and San Francisco a zillion times higher than in Big D? Never mind, I just remembered what those places look like.
Dallas and Fort Worth rank 22nd among the top 50 U.S. cities.
Los Angeles and Houston are both rated as more likely to have natural disaster than North Texas.
No surprise, given their proximity to earthquake faults and hurricane winds.
I guess D-FW's ranking got dinged by our killer hail and twisters.
Moving to Mesquite
Two companies are establishing distribution operations in Mesquite.
Bissell Home Care and Prime Distribution Services are leasing a total of more than a half-million square feet of industrial space from developer ProLogis near State Highway 80 and Loop 12. "Both of them are new to the area," said Rob Huthnance, ProLogis first vice president.
Bissell is renting 260,000 square feet, and Prime Distribution is taking about the same amount of space. The leases will fill ProLogis' building at 5351 Samuel Blvd.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Get Dear Ol Dad something different this year

2006-06-06T09:49:00.000-06:00

Cool new stuff at the bakery

2006-06-06T09:48:00.000-06:00

Click here

2006-05-26T12:44:00.001-06:00

Inside the store

2006-05-26T12:44:00.000-06:00

MMMMmmmmmmm

2006-05-26T12:42:00.000-06:00

Petit Fours

2006-05-26T12:41:00.000-06:00

The Black & White Cake

2006-05-26T12:40:00.000-06:00

Strawberry Shortcake

2006-05-26T12:39:00.000-06:00

New bakery gives petit four a makeover

2006-05-26T12:37:00.000-06:00

New bakery gives petit four a makeover
06:59 AM CDT on Wednesday, May 10, 2006

By TINA DANZE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
A new bakery has given the staid petit four a modern makeover. Petit Fours Cakes Gourmet sells large, drop-dead gorgeous versions that make traditional petits fours seem dowdy.

NATALIE CAUDILL/DMN Petit Fours Cakes Gourmet has the house specialty, of course, and more.
What's more, these cakes taste as good as they look, with extraordinary flavors such as Pink Passionfruit, Chocolate Toffee Obsession and Peanut Butter & Ganache. There are classic flavors, too: red velvet, Italian cream and German chocolate. They're created by pastry chef Bill Hunter, formerly of The Mansion on Turtle Creek, the Crescent and the Fairmont.
The petits fours are generously sized as four-bite desserts. Instead of coating them in traditional fondant, chef Hunter opts for buttercream, ganache or cream cheese frosting. And he doesn't cut corners: All cakes have five thin layers. But it's the fanciful decorations that wow you at first glance: intricate piping, fruit-leather figures and geometric chocolate accents.
The bakery also sells stunning larger cakes in 17 flavors and several sizes. Prices range from $5 for petits fours to $70 for a decadent party cake. That may sound steep, but co-owners Carolyn Key and Mary Jane Moreau see these desserts as a smart alternative to sending flowers. They offer delivery, gift-boxed sampler packs and online ordering.
Want a taste before sending a gift box? Sit in the bakery's parlor or at a table and enjoy petits fours with a latte, chocolate chai tea, white hot chocolate or an Italian soda.
Petit Fours Cakes Gourmet: 3000 Blackburn (facing McKinney Avenue at The Mondrian); 214-559-2253; www.pfcakes.com.
Hours: Monday-Saturday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Sunday.

My wife opened a new bakery on McKinney Ave. just North of Blackburn

2006-05-26T12:34:00.000-06:00

Check out http://www.pfcakes.com

Photos by JIM MAHONEY/DMN

2006-05-22T14:04:00.000-06:00

Photos by JIM MAHONEY/DMNThe penthouse bedroom patio offers a spectacular view from the Dallas high-rise, which once was the home of actress Greer Garson. Residents are seeking national historic status for the building with the help of Preservation Dallas.

Dallas architect Howard Meyer's 22-story building at 3525 Turtle Creek Blvd. was built in 1957.

2006-05-22T14:03:00.000-06:00

Grande Dame of Turtle Creek

2006-05-22T13:57:00.000-06:00

Grande Dame of Turtle Creek
First luxury high-rise on Dallas' own 'Gold Coast' nears its 50th birthday
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 21, 2006
By DAVID FLICK / The Dallas Morning News
There was a time, during one of the most colorful eras in Dallas history, when the building at 3525 Turtle Creek Blvd. was so famous, it didn't matter that it had no other name.

"This was the most prestigious address in town: 3525. That's all you had to say, and people knew where you were from," said Col. James Pinckney Caston, a longtime resident of the building, which is nearing its 50th anniversary.
People may have known other things about the building, as well: that actress Greer Garson lived there, as did oilmen, wealthy widows, several opera stars and two U.S. senators.

During the early 1960s, heartthrob Fabian stayed there while in town for a play. Actor Tyrone Power and his new bride were honored with a party there. And the Duchess of Argyll dined in the penthouse, capping a tour of Dallas that included a visit to a mobile home show.
Depending on how closely people followed news of Dallas society, they might have known that 3525's private club was once raided by the city vice squad, that a socialite's body was found floating in the building's swimming pool and that the 18th-floor apartment of Minnie Marcus – widow of the founder of the city's most renowned department store – was burglarized, with thieves taking $75,000 in jewelry and breaking into her liquor cabinet.
When construction of 3525 was announced in 1957, it was the first luxury high-rise along Turtle Creek, a strip that has since become Dallas' version of Chicago's Gold Coast.
Residents are working to put the building on the National Register of Historic Places. A documentary film also is planned.
Preservation Dallas, which is helping residents apply for historic status, has called the design by Dallas architect Howard Meyer "the most fully realized and successful modernist apartment building in Texas, perhaps in America."

'Best site in Dallas'
But Mr. Meyer, who died in 1988, once said in an interview that when builders Edward Dicker and Jerome Frank hired him, they gave him a simple marching order: "We're giving you the best site in Dallas. Don't spare the horses."
The 22-story building was constructed of tinted, reinforced concrete and Mexican brick near the site of what had long ago been the clubhouse of the Dallas Country Club.
Its pinwheel design gave each unit three views and nonconjoining walls that assured greater privacy. The heavy concrete construction allowed internal walls to be moved and rearranged at the whim of a resident's designer.
The building's most noticeable feature – the latticelike concrete brise soleil – was designed to filter the harsh Texas sun.
There were powder rooms on each floor for the maids, a large staff contractually forbidden to accept tips, a daily courtesy carwash, a swimming pool (with private cabanas) and a dining room.

Price of luxury
All that luxury came with a price. Units, which were then apartments, started at $350 a month when the building officially opened in 1958. Three-bedroom apartments rented for $700, and the penthouses went for $1,500 a month.
The building was converted to condominiums in the late 1970s. Today, a unit on the 15th floor is being offered for $460,000, according to Nancy Martinez of Virginia Cook Realtors, and other units have been priced at up to $850,000.
The building is coming back into demand despite being literally overshadowed by newer, taller and glitzier residential high-rises, Ms. Martinez said. Its 1950s architecture, particularly the distinctive sunscreens, can cut both ways with clients.
"You show it, and they either get it or they don't," she said.

Old money, oil money
Mr. Dicker's explanation in 1957 that the luxury high-rise was needed "because the rich man has been neglected in the past 30 years" triggered nationwide snickering. But when 3525 opened the next year, it was an immediate success.
The building was a favorite of both old money and oil money.
Sarah Cockrell Dargan, granddaughter of Dallas pioneers Alexander and Sarah Cockrell, rented an apartment there, as did Addie Samuell, widow of philanthropist W.W. Samuell. Jack Pew, the Sun Oil executive, lived on the 16th floor. Oil magnate Clint Murchison Sr. maintained an apartment on the fifth.
In less-security-conscious days, the elite residential building had a restaurant and beauty shop (the Salon de Coiffure) open to the public.
The private Club 3525 had a separate entrance off the porte-cochere, through which 56 of its patrons were loaded into paddy wagons in May 1960 after a vice squad raid to curtail after-hours drinking.
In an unrelated incident that same month, Mrs. Ballard Y. Burgher, wife of a prominent real estate investor, was found dead in 3525's signature round swimming pool, her shoes left at poolside. News accounts said authorities found no evidence of suicide or foul play.
More often, notices in the public broadsheets reflected awe or amusement toward the building's elite clients. The Dallas Morning News' Paul Crume frequently featured 3525 in his Big D column during the late 1950s and early '60s.
Mr. Crume's readers were invited to click their tongues at the story of a young 3525 resident who worked as a lifeguard and whose family chauffeur delivered lunch each day to him poolside. Then there was Mr. Crume's item about a tenant's dog that could purportedly enter an elevator and push the button for the lobby, to be met by a staff member who would take him for a walk.
In the early days, people would walk up from Turtle Creek Boulevard (then only two lanes wide) and try to talk their way onto the private floors, said F.C. Brown, a staff supervisor who has worked at 3525 since 1962, when he washed cars.
It was the job of the staff to ensure privacy. Some residents were easier to shield than others.

Fabian's fans
Hollywood stars who were appearing in local theaters often stayed in the building's apartments, Mr. Brown said. That included Fabian.
"A lot of the ladies would come by and want to meet him," Mr. Brown recalled. "They'd try to slip a guy two or three dollars to let them wait outside the door for an autograph."
Life, he remembered, was less formal then. Joe Lambert, a landscaper and arts patron, and Angus Wynne Sr., a prominent lawyer, always had time to talk football with the doormen.
Some of the oldest residents complain that times have changed, though none would do so for the record.
"It's just not the old families anymore," one resident said.
A veteran resident who welcomes the change is Col. Caston, who served in both the Army and Air Force.

Influx of younger people
"Younger people are moving in now," he said. "I think it's all for the better."
He has lived at 3525 for about 20 years, he said, and describes it as "a very private building. Nobody goes to each other's apartment unless invited."
But residents become neighbors.
Col. Caston said he got to know actress Greer Garson well. She and her husband, oilman Buddy Fogelson, once came to the colonel's apartment for Thanksgiving dinner.
In turn, Col. Caston was a frequent guest in Ms. Garson's penthouse, as – on occasion – were actors Joan Collins and Van Johnson and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Pianist Van Cliburn would play at her birthday parties.
Col. Caston said he couldn't imagine living anywhere else.
"Once you've lived in the Grande Dame of Turtle Creek, really nothing is ever the same," he said. "There are people you couldn't dynamite out of this building. Like me."
E-mail dflick@dallasnews.com

Woodlawn Update and Cedar Springs Tom Thumb Info

2006-05-20T07:48:00.000-06:00

Steve Brown:
06:54 AM CDT on Friday, May 19, 2006
Homes near Parkland
In-town housing developer Perry Homes has purchased a creek-side property near Parkland Memorial Hospital with plans to construct townhouses.
The 5.5-acre site on Production Drive is between Harry Hines Boulevard and Maple Avenue and is largely undeveloped.
"We came up with the idea of putting a bridge across the creek to access the property," said real estate broker Mike Turner of J. Elmer Turner Realtors. Mr. Turner brokered the sale to Perry Homes with Les Teitz.
About 68 townhomes will be constructed on the site, Mr. Turner said.
"The property lays out well and will make a residential enclave," he said.
The development site is about two blocks from Motor Street, where FirstWorthing Corp. and Greenway Investment are building a 16-acre apartment and retail complex.

Noodling for ideas
A real estate firm is hunting for a new use for a vacant Oak Lawn supermarket.
United Commercial Realty is exploring leasing and development options for the empty Tom Thumb store on Cedar Springs Road at Douglas Avenue.
The 33,000-square-foot vacant building was constructed in 1966 and later enlarged. It sits on about two acres a few blocks from the Dallas North Tollway.
The property is controlled by Crossland Enterprises, which has hired United Commercial Realty to find a new use.
"The first thing we are going to attempt is to lease the building," said UCR's Teri Dorazil. "But the new owners have also developed plans with residential construction above ground-floor retail, like a mini West Village."

Woodlawn progress
Alliance Communities – a Phoenix-based developer with several apartment projects in the Dallas area – is moving ahead with plans to buy the historic Woodlawn Hospital property on Maple Avenue in Oak Lawn.
A few weeks ago, Alliance's $16.5 million offer to buy the 8.3-acre historic hospital complex was accepted by the Parkland Health & Hospital System. Alliance got the contract to buy Woodlawn after two bids were held.
Alliance's Nick Chapman said the developer is moving ahead on redeveloping the landmark.
"Optimally, we could get started in the fourth quarter, but more than likely it will be first quarter 2007," Mr. Chapman said "We are exploring four or five different development scenarios – some are mixed-use and some are exclusively multifamily."

From Frontburner: Dang it, I liked Tower Records

2006-05-18T20:41:00.000-06:00

DEAN & DELUCA TO OPEN IN OAKLAWN
In the old, well from what I hear soon to be old, Tower Records spot on Lemmon Ave. Eatzi’s to be an outie? We’ll see. Back to you, Free Bird. I mean Rod.
Nancy Nichols · 03:04 PM

Madi Museum

2006-05-18T10:18:00.000-06:00

Madi Museum may fall to Condo Craziness

2006-05-18T10:15:00.000-06:00

May 17, 2006
Goodbye, Art. Hello, Commerce.

Filed under: News You Can Actually Use, Actually
Take a good look at the MADI Museum. It may not be around much longer.
If you were to visit the Web site of Kilgore & Kilgore, PLLC–the 58-year-old law film specializing in, among other things, cases dealing with intellectual property and personal-injury class actions–you will see seven serious-looking attorneys posed in front of a building bursting with color. That building, located at 3109 Carlisle Street in Uptown, is home to Kilgore’s offices, the Kilgore Law Center and the MADI Museum, the latter designed and created by artist Volf Roitman, who transformed the entirety of the two-story, 16,564-square-foot 1970s building into one of the few pieces of public artwork on display in Dallas. And he did so with the owner of the building and the law firm, Bill Masterson, who, with his wife Dorothy, brought in Roitman to turn a bland building into something blindingly bright and otherworldly–a burst of sunlight on an otherwise dimly lit lot.
The MADI Museum, with its facade consisting of 65 laser-cut panels painted by the artist, opened three years ago with great fanfare and gushing praise; writing in The Dallas Morning News, architecture critic David Dillon celebrated the building for adding to “the fledgling funkiness of McKinney Avenue,” while Peter Frank of the LA Weekly insisted that “not since the Museum of non-Objective Art in New York morphed into the Guggenheim Museum more than half a century ago has there been anything like this in North America.”
The MADI Museum’s Web site is full of such accolades, as well as a glowing recounting of how Roitman and the Mastersons fell in love some 12 years ago over a 60-plus-year-old Argentinian-born art movement no one can really describe. We tried a few years back, and got no further than this attempt: “Some speculate it means ‘movement, abstraction, dimension and invention,’ but no one is positive what the letters stand for.”
And now, Volf Roitman isn’t sure whether the building and the artwork he created in and around it will stand for much longer. Just three years after the MADI Museum opened, there’s a good chance it could be leveled to make way for condos–because the very people who commissioned Roitman to overhaul the building are trying to sell it, potentially to developers who would reduce the whole thing to a pile of bricks and bolts. At least, that’s what Trammell Crow Co. representatives are suggesting in their listing for the property at 3109 Carlisle. Says right there on the Web site: “vacant land” for sale, some 44,000 square feet of it, with a proposed use for “multifamily” development. There is no mention of Roitman’s work on the exterior of the building–which would not survive the building’s sale, because even moving it would be impossible. As Roitman says in legal documents sitting in the Dallas federal courthouse: “The panels are so thin, were they to be removed, there would no way to keep them intact.” Which is why Roitman, using a Richardson-based attorney, has filed for a temporary injunction in U.S. District Court, Northern Division, seeking to prevent the sale of the building and the destruction of his artwork.

His attorney, Jonathan Winocour of Winocour & Scarbrough, filed the application on April 19. Winocour claims that if the Kilgore Law Center Investment Group, LP, sells the building and allows its demolition–and the destruction of Roitman’s work–then the owners will be violating a federal statute. And, indeed, the government in 1990 did pass a law that protects artists’ work from harm. Called the Visual Artists Rights Act, it says, in part, that the author of a work of visual art has the right:
“(A) to prevent any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation, and any intentional distortion, mutilation, or modification of that work is a violation of that right, and
(B) to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature, and any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of that work is a violation of that right.”
Roitman says in his affidavit, filed with the court April 19, that “if the building is destroyed, the artworks [involved in] this controversy will not survive, snce the artworks are organically integrated with the building and cannot be removed without their destruction.”
“We’re not tring to retsrict their right to sell their property, although that may be the effect,” says Winocour. “Our intent is to protect the artwork on the façade. If someone wants to buy the building and preserve the façade, we’re not going to object, but it’s been advertised as vacant land, and no one is contemplating the preservation of the building.” Except, of course, Roitman and his attorneys.
On May 2, Kilgore Law Center Investment Group filed its own documents with the court. They claim Roitman’s desire to save his artwork has “greatly reduced” the property’s value, by some $75,000, and that it would be rendered valueless should the court grant the injunction “since the market value of the land without the building and Plaintiff’s alleged ‘artwork’ is substantially” more than the value of the land with the building and art. Kilgore’s response, which is signed by none other than Bill Masterson, insists that Roitman only wants the art to stand “solely to protect his own ‘honor,’ ‘reputation’ and ego,” and says that Roitman got plenty out of his affiliation with the building and law firm “in terms of publicity, prestige, honor and reputation from” Kilgore. Masterson’s also claiming there’s no legit claim under the VARA, since Roitman’s was a work for hire–meaning Masterson bought it and can do what he pleases with the installation. (Masterson was unavailable for comment.)
This battle will likely rage on for months, well into next year: A jury trial has tentatively been set for February, and till then Roitman will try to get the court to grant an injunction to stay the building’s demolition at least till legal proceedings are finished. It could get pretty messy; it usually is when a federal statute such as the Visual Artists Rights Act, is involved.
“The point is, the artwork is unique and kind of special, a wonderful expresson of public art,” Winocour says. “Dallas has very little, unlike New York or Los Angeles, because there’s not a lot of public investment in this city. We have billionaire philanthropists like Ray Nasher, but there’s little public art, and it would be nice to present it in a city that likes to see itself as a world-class city. If it wants to be London or Paris it needs to encourage this. And it’s great that at one time Mr. Masterson did…but if you challenge the constituionality of a statute designed to protect the artist and work and cast yourself as a patron of the arts, I think you’re talking our of both sides of your mouth.” –Robert Wilonsky

Color Arts District Rendering...looks pretty cool.

2006-02-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

Great Location

2006-02-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

This one could be very cool, looking over the Nasher should never get old.

2006-02-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

Condos in the midst of culture
Dallas Arts District to gain $100 million residential tower
10:17 AM CST on Tuesday, January 31, 2006
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
Dallas' newest residential high-rise will be a standout in an exclusive neighborhood.
Located smack between the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, the 20-story Museum Tower has what developers hope is a one-of-a-kind address.
"We think we have an extraordinary site," said John Sughrue, whose Brook Partners is teaming up with investor Turtle Creek Holdings to build the $100 million tower. "It is in the true heart of the Arts District."
Indeed, it would be hard to find a more central location than the block between Pearl and Olive streets. The residential building will overlook the Nasher sculpture garden and tower over the nearby symphony hall and Dallas Museum of Art.
"Our aspiration was to design a residence that will offer a sophisticated urban lifestyle," Mr. Sughrue, who has developed other projects downtown, said Monday.
The sleek stone and glass building was designed by architect Rick del Monte with the Beck Group – who collaborated on the Nasher Sculpture Center and the new Hunt Consolidated tower a few blocks away on Woodall Rodgers Freeway. Booziotis & Co. Architects has been hired to work on the interior spaces.
Mr. Sughrue said the plan is to build a condo tower that "will complement our Arts District neighbors – more timeless than flamboyant."
The building is designed to contain between 100 and 125 condos, depending how large the buyers want. The units will range in size from around 900 square feet to 7,500 square feet and will be "priced competitively" with other luxury buildings in the market, the developers said. Most of those projects sell for between $450 and $600 per square foot, depending upon how elaborate the building is.
Along with the central building, the Museum Tower will include underground parking, a half-dozen low-rise townhouses directly across from the Nasher garden, a swimming pool and gardens for the residents. The north side of the building also faces one of the parks planned for across the freeway.
"We think this Woodall Rodgers Park will be a fabulous amenity to this building," said Robbie Briggs of Briggs Freeman Real Estate Brokerage, which is marketing the project. "We are appealing to people who are truly interested in good architecture and the Arts District."
Museum Tower is scheduled to start construction later this year and will take about 18 to 24 months to complete.
Because of its location, the building will be one of the most visible additions to the 20-block cultural district on the north side of downtown.
The Arts District is also seeing construction of the $275 million Dallas Center for Performing Arts and the $100 million One Arts Plaza building, which will house 7-Eleven's corporate offices, condos and retail space.
The timing for the Museum Tower couldn't be better, said Bill Lively, president of the Dallas Center for Performing Arts Foundation.
"This complement brings life into the district," Mr. Lively said. "In every case where these things work effectively, there is a residential component."
Planned in the 1980s, the Arts District was always designed for a variety of construction. But during the early years, the private-sector focus was on office space.
Eight years ago when Brook Partners bought the Museum Tower site, the plan was to do an office tower.
"When the Arts District was laid out, they sought a residential component," said Daniel Boeckman with Turtle Creek Holdings. "It's all coming together right now."
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Uptown's biggest landlord check's out Las Colinas

2006-01-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

Taking a bit of Uptown to Irving
03:18 PM CST on Tuesday, January 10, 2006
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
Gables Residential, the busiest apartment builder in central Dallas, is going to take a little bit of Uptown to Irving.
Gables has purchased about 13 acres in the center of Las Colinas where it plans to build a high-density mixed-use project. The lakeside development will include hundreds of apartments, a shopping center and also is planned for a future condo tower and hotel.
The development site is in the Las Colinas Urban Center on O'Connor Boulevard east of State Highway 114. It is directly across the street from Las Colinas' landmark bronze mustangs sculpture.
"It's across from Williams Square and on the water," Gables senior vice president Doug Chesnut said Monday. "It's a great piece of real estate."
Gables purchased the property from the Las Colinas Land L.P. in a deal negotiated by Cousins Properties. The sale was one of the last made by Cousins before Houston developer Hines took ownership of the remaining vacant land in Las Colinas at the end of 2005.
Because of the size of the development, it will take almost a year to plan and engineer.
"We will do it in multiple phases," Mr. Chesnut said. "We can make this the heart of the Urban Center."
Early concepts call for almost 800 apartments with more than 200,000 square feet of retail space on the lower floors.
With more than 1,000 apartment units under construction in Las Colinas, the addition of an Uptown-style retail center should boost rental demand in the neighborhood, said Dallas apartment analyst Mike Puls.
"Walking to nearby retail is a great advantage for apartments," Mr. Puls said. "This should help all of them."
And Gables has experience with mixed-use development. The builder was joined in the construction of the next phase of Dallas' Cityplace project. The two Gables projects are located across the street from the West Village and include apartments above ground-level stores.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Cha-Ching!

2006-01-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

Cha-Ching!

2006-01-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

Cashing out in Uptown

2006-01-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

GlobeSt.com EXCLUSIVE: Seller Yields $91M From Two Uptown SalesFriday,
January 6, 2006 By Connie Gore

DALLAS-CB Richard Ellis Strategic Partners LLC has ended its reign over two class A office buildings in Uptown, selling its last holdings in the submarket for $90.5 million in a year-end close-out. Sources say the Los Angeles-based investment group has pocketed $24.5 million for McKinney Place and $66.2 million for 3500 Maple.
KBS Realty Advisors of Newport Beach, CA won the nod for the 145,610-sf McKinney Place at 3131 McKinney Ave. while Triple Net Properties LLC of Santa Ana, CA scored the win for the 374,165-sf, 18-story high rise at 3500 Maple Ave. In both cases, the CB Richard Ellis Inc. team of Russell Ingrum and Gary Carr and CBRE Strategic Partners' principal Michael Burrichter masterminded the back-to-back sales. The dealmakers weren't available for comment prior to publication time. Both buildings, situated less than a mile apart, went on the sales block in the fall.
McKinney Place's leasing and management reins were turned over to Transwestern Commercial Services' senior vice president Kim Brooks and vice president Matt Didyk. Local firm Capstar Commercial Real Estate Services, which had been overseeing McKinney Place, held fast to the 3500 Maple Ave. assignment.
A KBS spokesman says the location and dynamics of the Uptown/Turtle Creek submarket were the driving forces behind its decision to buy the 89%-leased McKinney Place--its third acquisition in less than three months in Texas. The day before KBS bought McKinney Place, it closed a $20-million deal for the fully leased Travis Oaks, a 123,434-sf, multi-tenant office building at 5113 Southwest Parkway in Austin. The seller was the Chicago-based Transwestern Investment Co., which had TCS Austin executives Hale Umstattd and Ty Puckett brokering the deal. And in October, KBS paid $41.5 million for the seven-building, 297,593-sf Lincoln at Legacy in Plano, north of Dallas. The buying spree has pushed KBS' Texas portfolio, now valued at $692 million, to 7.3 million sf.
The KBS spokesman says the plan is to hold McKinney Place, an eight-story office building atop a six-story parking garage, as a long-term investment and "maintain its strong occupancy." At this time, no renovations are planned for the 22-year-old structure.
As for 3500 Maple, it was renovated just three years ago when CBRE Strategic Partners bought it. The 20-year-old landmark, complemented by a six-story parking garage, is 94% leased, with no rollovers for "two to three years," Johnny Johnson, a Capstar partner, tells GlobeSt.com. "It is well stabilized. With the investment sales market being what it is today, it was the optimum time to sell." Top tenants are Heritage Capital Corp., Katz Communications Inc., Hanson Aggregates West Inc. and the Rose Walker law firm.
Johnson says McKinney Place "is the exact same story." It too has no lease rollovers for at least two years. Its roster is a mix of mostly law and accounting firms.
Triple Net had in-house exec Chris Rooney overseeing its negotiations; KBS had an acquisitions team from Chicago leading its bargaining. Triple Net's financing, provided by Wachovia Bank, was arranged by Wally Reid, Matt Kafka and Adam Jackson of Holliday Fenoglio Fowler LP. Details weren't available about KBS' financing arrangements.

3500 Maple used to be called Reverchon Plaza

2006-01-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

3500 Maple sells....Everything in Uptown is for sale.

2006-01-05T18:38:00.000-07:00

Press Release
Source: Triple Net Properties, LLC
Triple Net Properties Acquires 3500 MapleThursday January 5, 6:23 pm ET
SANTA ANA, Calif., Jan. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Louis Rogers, President of Triple Net Properties, LLC, announced today the acquisition of 3500 Maple, on behalf of NNN 2003 Value Fund, LLC, a public company managed by Triple Net Properties, LLC. The acquisition closed on December 27, 2005.
3500 Maple is a 377,000 square foot, 18 story, landmark office property that is prominently visible within the Dallas skyline. The property is positioned within the heart of the Dallas Uptown District, a desirable 24-hour urban setting known for leading the Metroplex in high rental rates and occupancy levels. The property offers tenants brilliant asset quality, incomparable amenity package, immediate access to three major highways (US-75, I-35, Dallas North Tollway), commanding visibility and impressive tenant roster. 3500 Maple is approximately 93% leased to 35 tenants and major tenants include: Heritage Capital Corporation, Hanson Aggregates West, Inc. and Susquehanna Radio Corporation.
The property was purchased from CB Richard Ellis Investors, LLC, which was represented by Gary Carr and Russell Ingrum of CB Richard Ellis. Chris Rooney of Triple Net Properties represented the buyer. Financing was provided by Wachovia Bank and was arranged by Wally Reid, Matt Kafka, and Adam Jackson of Holliday, Fenoglio, Fowler, L.P.
About Triple Net Properties
Triple Net Properties, LLC offers a diverse line of investment products as well as a full-range of services including asset and property management, brokerage, leasing, analysis and consultation. Our investors, tenants and industry partners have come to trust Triple Net's company-wide standard of outstanding service and integrity.
From our home office in Southern California and numerous regional offices, Triple Net Properties manages a growing portfolio of over 27 million square feet of commercial properties including 2.1 million square feet of multi- family properties with a combined market value of over $3.7 billion as of December 31, 2005. In addition, Triple Net Properties Realty, Inc. is one of only 500 firms nationwide that have been awarded the Accredited Management Organization (AMO) designation from the Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM). Triple Net's size and flexibility also allow us to seize opportunities that our larger, institutional competitors miss. What's more, our creative, innovative approach to real estate finds value in all sizes and types of properties, allowing us to provide products and services to meet every investment need.
For more information about Triple Net Properties, please call 1.877.888.7348 or visit our website at http://www.1031nnn.com/.

Danielle DiMartino:Condo market is due for a checkup

2006-01-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

Danielle DiMartino:Condo market is due for a checkup
08:44 AM CST on Friday, December 30, 2005

Hey, Dallas, did I mention better early than late?
The fine print of Thursday's existing-home sales report contained some very interesting tidbits. I refer to the data on condominiums, those tall towers of speculation that so personify this housing bubble.
(One caveat: The National Association of Realtors has kept data on condos for only two years, so there's not much history here.)
After peaking at a 963,000 annualized rate in June, U.S. condo sales are off by 11 percent; they hit 857,000 in November. Speculators' tempered enthusiasm has driven price gains down to 10 percent from 18 percent in June.
Most notably, condo inventories have doubled in a year and a half. In June 2004, inventories were at 218,000 units and running at an ultra-skinny 3.1 months' supply. As of November, the number of condos on the market is at 423,000, or 5.9 months.
Given that the one-month move in inventories was a whopper – supply was just 5.4 months in October – I'd say it's safe to conclude we've crossed into no-man's land by now. In the next month we'll find out we ended 2005 north of the crucial six months' supply level.
Who hears a pop?
That means, for those of you looking to buy, it's now officially your market. For those of you in the market to sell, well ... .
That brings us back to Dallas and whether I called the bubble early or whether others are late to the party.
Judging by my very technical analysis – I drove around Uptown and craned my neck skyward – local condo developers are stuck in a time warp. They must think we're about to enter 2003, not 2006.
Local real estate types tell me that out-of-staters are behind much of the oversupply that's set to flood the market next year and the year after. They say some of the behemoths under construction have been sold to more speculators than future residents.
I've got news for local developers: Speculators are dumping condos from Vegas to Miami. Some buyers are breaking contracts before construction is complete.
Local snapshot
That leaves Dallasites to hold up the value of these yet-to-be-completed high-rises, just when the market is playing dead.
Here's as brief a snapshot as I can offer on the health of the local market. According to Foreclosure Listing Service of Addison:
•D-FW foreclosures rose 4 percent in 2005 to a cycle record of 32,513. The only year that was worse was 1989 – an ugly time.
•The percentage of foreclosees who owed more than the property was worth rose to 16.2 percent from 14.4 percent in 2004.
•Foreclosures linked to home-equity defaults leaped 52 percent, to 5.6 percent of the total, from 3.7 percent in 2004.
The reality is, local buyers are in no shape to ride to the rescue of the current oversupply of condos, much less any elephants-to-be reaching for the sky.
E-mail ddimartino@dallasnews.com

Steve Brown's Year in Review

2006-01-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

Area real estate had big year
12:04 PM CST on Friday, December 30, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Buying, building and leasing – 2005 has been a big year for the local real estate market.
Low interest rates and rabid investor appetites fueled a boom the likes of which Big D hasn't seen since the 1980s.
Billions of dollars in commercial properties changed hands, and construction cranes have sprouted on everything from Uptown condos to suburban office space.
At the same time, the local housing market shows no sign of a slowdown. In fact, prices are inching up.
Sure, there are a few bugs on the windshield. Office vacancy rates remain stubbornly high, and worries about a housing bubble won't go away.
But the North Texas property market will start out the new year in the best shape in over a decade.
Now, if we just don't mess it up.

Biggest Boom: Victory
After limping along at a snail's pace for several years, Uptown's Victory project switched into hyperdrive in 2005.
The W Dallas Victory Hotel and Residences was joined by six more buildings – four residential projects and two retail and office buildings now under construction.
It all adds up to more than a half-billion dollars in development under way in the 75-acre project just north of downtown.
And there's more to come.
Groundbreakings set for 2006 include the first of two office towers, a Mandarin Oriental Hotel and condominiums, plus designer Philippe Starck and Yoo Ltd.'s the House condo tower.

Biggest Sales: Lincoln Centre, Las Colinas
North Texas' property market had a boom year.
Investors from around the world snapped up buildings and development sites, ignoring naysaying from Wall Street analysts.
The biggest building sale this year was the Lincoln Centre complex in North Dallas, which was bought for more than $250 million by New York-based Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund.
And in the same week that TIAA-CREF bought Lincoln Centre, it sold the Millennium Center development in Las Colinas. Houston developer Hines also picked up about 600 undeveloped acres in the Irving project for an estimated $100 million.

Biggest Rebound: Telecom Corridor
I had started calling it the Telegone Corridor, but now a surge in leasing by nontelecom companies is helping fill the void in the Richardson office market.
The Telecom Corridor led North Texas in office leasing in 2005.
And developers recently announced plans for a new mixed-use complex that will bring needed shopping space and apartments to the area on DART's light rail line.

Biggest Project Completion: High five
After almost four years of construction, the $261 million High Five interchange project in North Dallas opened this fall.
Real estate investors began celebrating early. The construction tangle had slowed sales and leasing, and as soon as the end was in sight, properties around the intersection of LBJ Freeway and North Central Expressway started trading at a fast clip.
Office landlords in the area shouldn't get too comfortable, though. Starting in 2007, work begins to widen LBJ Freeway. That project will make the High Five look like a pothole patch.

Biggest New Market: The Trinity
Dallas residents have been talking about fixing up the Trinity River bottoms since the days of John Neely Bryan's first cabin.
And so far, it's mostly been talk.
Now that construction is starting on the first of a series of landmark bridges, real estate developers are buying into the idea of a showplace river park.
Apartment builders including United Dominion Realty and JPI are staking out development sites on the north bank of the Trinity.
Other real estate investors are combing the area along Industrial Boulevard for building sites.

Biggest Move: 7-Eleven to downtown
Convenience store giant 7-Eleven Inc. is moving only about a mile, from Cityplace to the Arts District.
But the message it sends about downtown Dallas is loud and clear.
With one of North Texas' biggest corporations coming downtown, other firms and developers are taking a new look at Dallas' city center.
Attractive land prices and growing amenities are helping downtown compete with suburban business districts. Gas prices over $2 a gallon also make close-in locations more appealing.

Biggest Buying Opportunity: The Masonic Temple
If you've always wanted to live like a grand pooh-bah, we have just the building for you.The 64-year-old Masonic Temple on Harwood Street is for sale, and $5 million will get you the 43,000-square-foot temple, plus three other historic buildings on the downtown block.
The temple comes with a lot of history.
Built to accommodate 6,000 Masons and 750 members of the Eastern Star, the art deco landmark has a 500-seat auditorium, lodge rooms, a banquet hall, library, lecture rooms and offices.

Biggest Bust: Home foreclosures
Near-record-low interest rates and an improving economy weren't enough to put the brakes on North Texas home foreclosures.
More than 32,000 homes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were posted for forced sale this year by lenders, an increase of 4 percent from 2004.
That's a whopping 55 percent jump in foreclosures from 2002.
Real estate analysts blame the home loan defaults on record-high credit-card debt and continued corporate cutbacks.
Another factor is that many marginal homebuyers have used "creative" mortgage plans to get into houses they can't afford.
Expect more of the same in 2006.
January's home foreclosures are already up 4 percent.

Biggest Bungle: Tax change proposals
Federal bean counters ran into a buzz saw this year when they suggested doing away with tax deductions for the housing market.
President Bush's tax reform advisory commission thinks it would be a great idea for homeowners to lose their tax breaks.
The housing industry and most consumer groups were quick to shout no to this boneheaded plan. The last thing America needs is a change that would make homeownership more expensive.

Biggest Wait: The Merc
I once called the Mercantile National Bank building the rotten tooth in downtown's smile. Now some long-overdue dental work is about to begin on the Main Street landmark.
Forest City Enterprises of Cleveland cemented a $270 million deal with the city of Dallas to convert the vacant 36-story skyscraper and an adjoining tower into commercial and residential space.
To get the job done, the city had to pony up $70 million in incentives. A last-minute tussle over who would pay to preserve the art from the buildings added to the suspense. But – finally – the biggest blight on Dallas' skyline is going to get a redo.

Good article about the Woodall Rodgers Park

2005-12-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

Woodall Rodgers park planners make an effort not to overreach
Dallas: Building more than 3 parts may be too costly, impractical
06:29 AM CST on Tuesday, December 27, 2005
By DAVE LEVINTHAL / The Dallas Morning News
The question isn't so much whether Dallas will build a "deck park" spanning Woodall Rodgers Freeway between Uptown and the downtown Arts District. More important are when, how big, and at what cost?
Keeping the park under budget – $60 million – and on schedule – completed by decade's end – may involve building something smaller than what's in the most expansive proposal, city planners acknowledge.
A blueprint prepared for park planners by engineering and architecture firm Carter and Burgess calls for the creation of up to six park segments stretching from west of Akard Street to east of Pearl Street.
But anything more extensive than three main park segments would create several engineering challenges that would probably cause costs to spike. A six-segment park would, for example, require tons more building material. Huge fans underneath the deck would probably be needed to clear automobile exhaust.
"You'd have to essentially design it as a tunnel," said Wes McClure, a Texas Department of Transportation official advising on the project.
A more realistic scenario is building three park segments that would cover the canyonlike stretch of Woodall Rodgers from St. Paul Street to Pearl Street, said Dallas park and recreation director Paul Dyer.
"The entire thing – that's a very expensive length to develop," Mr. Dyer said. "Building the core section is very much feasible. And there seems to be considerable appetite in the private sector to raise funds."
A key variable in this public-private funding venture is billionaire oilman Ray Hunt, who is building his 15-story Hunt Consolidated international headquarters one block west of where the deck park's core section would end.
Business people involved in raising private funding for the park say that Mr. Hunt may want it extended in front of his headquarters but that no formal discussions on how to pay for it have occurred.
Hunt Consolidated officials declined several requests to comment on the proposed park.
Initial plans for the park, unveiled in February, call for $20 million in federal funding; $15 million to $20 million in city funding; and $15 million to $20 million in private donations.
City officials and many downtown business interests view the park as the city's best opportunity to link the booming Uptown and Arts District areas while creating badly needed center-city green space. Some people involved also speculate that property values along Woodall Rodgers will increase considerably.
To date, the private and public officials coordinating park plans have secured a $10 million federal grant and about $3.5 million in private donations, said Jody Grant, chairman of Texas Capital Bank, who donated $1 million of his own money.
A working park design, including its size and features, must be determined before fundraising efforts begin in earnest, Mr. Grant said.
"There are a lot of moving parts now, and the cost will determine how much we go out to the public for," he said. "We've first got to get our arms around this. This kind of project is whatever you want it to be."
Expect a working design by early next year, with aggressive fundraising efforts and public input sessions to begin shortly afterward, said Linda Owen, president of the Real Estate Council, which is heavily involved in the project's planning.
"Right now, we're still evaluating all options. This is a very complicated public/private-sector venture," Ms. Owen said. "But the private sector is committed. I don't have any reason to believe we can't get to our budget number."
E-mail dlevinthal@dallasnews.com

Two Turtle Creek Sells

2005-12-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

INDUSTRY WRAPUPS
From the December 23, 2005 print edition
Real Estate
Two Metroplex office towers trade hands
Christine Perez
Staff Writer
Two more big Metroplex office properties have traded.
Colony Realty Partners out of Boston has acquired Preston Park Financial Center, a two-building, 359,000-square-foot complex in Plano. It's the investor's first North Texas buy. Financial terms of the transaction weren't disclosed.
The property was on the market just three weeks, say the brokers, Gary Carr and Russell Ingrum with CB Richard Ellis Inc. The duo represented the seller, Los Angeles-based Strategic Partners Inc., a CBRE affiliate.
"Because of the demographic growth in the northern edges of the suburbs, a lot of buyers want to explore that market," Carr said. "Preston Park Financial Center, which has an occupancy of about 92%, is a stabilized trophy within the submarket, and it generated a very strong response."
Also under new ownership is Two Turtle Creek, a 236,600-square-foot, mixed-use property at Blackburn Street and Oak Lawn Avenue in Uptown. Stanford, Conn.-based Common Fund Realty Inc. paid an undisclosed sum to the seller, Cornerstone Realty Advisors. The offering attracted numerous buyers due to its location and potential redevelopment play -- meaning the 18-story office tower could find new life as upscale condominiums.
The Dallas investment properties market could top $3 billion in sales during 2005. Carr and Ingrum also recently brokered the $255 million sale of Lincoln Centre to New York-based TIAA-CREF.
"All of these sales were to institutional funds," Ingrum said. "It's the kind of money you like to see coming into the marketplace."

cperez@bizjournals.com 214-706-7120

Condo Craziness I say.....Crazy!!

2005-12-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

Steve Brown:High-rises: No holding back
But developers face a challenge in filling so many costly units
01:55 PM CST on Friday, December 16, 2005
Dallas developers aren't buying all the chatter about a housing bubble.
You can tell it by looking at all the high-rise condominium projects in the works.
There are about 15 projects with more than 1,700 luxury condo units being offered in the Dallas area.
Although that's a fraction of the total housing construction in North Texas, the pool of buyers willing to pay as much as $450 per square foot for high-rise living can go only so far.
Compare that price tag to the average cost of a home in the Park Cities – $273 per square foot. And the average pre-owned single-family home in North Texas sells for $89 per square foot.
At least seven more condo projects are on the drawing boards for Uptown.
With the high-rises already on the market, the neighborhood could add 1,000 units or so.
Most of the latest deals have something in common: They're all getting larger.
With rising land and construction costs, most developers can't afford to build fewer than 100 units.
That means even more high-rise condos to find buyers for.
And their success won't depend just on the strength of the local housing market.
With as many as 30 percent of the pre-sales in these buildings going to what are believed to be investors – some from California and Florida – a housing crash in out-of-state markets could affect demand here.
If that happens, some of the condo projects being touted won't make it out of the planning stage.
Stoneleigh project
Speaking of high-rise condos, the developers of the Stoneleigh Residences, a $60 million project adjacent to the historic Stoneleigh Hotel, have hired McCarthy Building Cos. as general contractor for the project. McCarthy is also building the new W Dallas Victory Hotel and Residences.
McCarthy subsidiary Residential Constructors LLC is scheduled to start work on the building in the first quarter of 2006.
Developers Prescott Realty Group and Apollo Real Estate Advisors LLC plan to have the 97-unit condo tower, plus a remodeling of the hotel, done by late 2007.
B&N off to the mall
Barnes & Noble is joining the tenant lineup at the new Prestonwood Town Center shopping mall under construction at Montfort and Belt Line roads.
The bookseller has announced it will build a new store in the shopping complex, and then close its store at 14999 Preston Road.
Wal-Mart is also opening a store in the center.
Big business in Big Easy
There are signs that the storm-battered city of New Orleans is returning to life.
The Dallas office of Jones Lang LaSalle recently completed the sale of Causeway Plaza, a 336,599-square-foot office building in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie.
The sale of the 90 percent leased building to the Feil Organization of New York was arranged by Evan Stone and Linda Simpson on behalf of an institutional investor.
"While the company invests nationally, its willingness to further commit to the Gulf Coast is testament to their belief in the resiliency of the market and bright future for New Orleans and the surrounding communities," Mr. Stone said.
In a bigger coup for the Crescent City, the National Association of Realtors has announced that it will hold its annual convention in New Orleans next November.
The Realtors considered moving the show – which attracts more than 20,000 visitors – but after research decided to stick with New Orleans.
Note ...
Robert Lynn Co., a Dallas real estate service firm that has been in business since 1962, has joined NAI Global. The New Jersey-based firm is an international network of independently owned real estate brokers with 300 offices.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

NAI Robert Lynn

2005-12-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

The gear is gone but the name lives on NAI Robert Lynn

2005-12-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

Robert Lynn Co. Flies New Flag, Plans Full-Service PlatformFriday, December 16, 2005 By Connie Gore DALLAS-The 43-year-old Robert Lynn Co. will fly a new banner as the NAI affiliate for Greater Dallas, the lead-in play to becoming a full-service firm in the coming year.
The flag will be planted as NAI Robert Lynn, backfilling a gap in Dallas created by the merger of NAI Stoneleigh Huff Brous McDowell into Transwestern Commercial Services. NAI Huff Partners remains solidly rooted as the Fort Worth affiliate.
NAI Global's David Blanchard, a Portland, OR-based executive for the Princeton, NJ-headquartered network, interviewed "four or five" Dallas firms since September before giving the nod to the 26-broker Robert Lynn Co., says its CEO and principal George Dutter.
NAI Robert Lynn will remain privately owned with all corporate chiefs intact. Mark Miller continues as president and principal while Thomas Lynn will assume the role of business director, the liaison between NAI's network and his firm.
"We think this is the most significant thing in our history," Dutter tells GlobeSt.com. As for founder Robert Lynn, an octogenarian who comes to work each day, he too "thinks it's a good move," Dutter says.
The branding is key to the local firm's plans to add retail and property management teams to its office and industrial operation, according to Dutter. The search has begun for a top broker to lead a retail team. He says the plan is to ramp up a retail leasing team in the first quarter and add property management by the end of next year. "It all comes down to us finding the right person to lead those two divisions," he says.
Founded as an industrial brokerage firm, Robert Lynn Co. added an office division four years ago. Today, there are 20 industrial and six office brokers.
Dutter sees the NAI network of 300 offices worldwide as "a springboard" for clients inside and outside Dallas. "NAI is recognized as a safe choice," he says. "That's going to be a big help to us." Plus, he adds, the NAI flag will be "a driving force" when it hits the streets as a full-service firm.

Uptown loses one to Downtown.....but it's all good

2005-12-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

Law firm makes a case for downtown
Carrington Coleman is 2nd law firm this week to announce move

11:16 AM CST on Thursday, December 15, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Twenty years ago, Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal LLP left downtown Dallas to move to Uptown.
Now the big law firm is coming back – leasing 85,000 square feet in the 72-story Bank of America Plaza.
It's one of the largest relocations to downtown in years and the second such move announced this week.
On Monday, law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP said it is shifting its offices from the Galleria to the J.P. Morgan Chase Tower on Ross Avenue.
These deals and others in the works are positive signs for the central business district office market, real estate analysts say.
"We are talking to some other tenants that are currently located in suburban markets that are considering downtown," said Daryl Mullin, senior director with Cushman & Wakefield of Texas. Mr. Mullin helped negotiate Carrington, Coleman's move downtown along with Cushman & Wakefield's Lawrence Gardner, Bill McClung and Clay Vaughn.
"This verifies there is the beginning of a trend," said Mr. Mullin, who says years of loft apartment construction, new retail and other improvements have put downtown back on the map for office tenants. "Tenants are taking a serious look."
Rental rates also play a role. Lease costs have risen in many suburban buildings, but downtown office space is a relative bargain. At the end of September, the average office rent downtown was quoted at around $17 per square foot annually, compared with about $22 in Uptown and North Dallas, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
"I feel reasonably sure economics played a part in Carrington Coleman's decision, since they are in the Crescent and considering their alternatives downtown," Mr. Mullin said.
The Crescent has some of the highest office rents in Dallas, with prices topping $30 for some space.
Fletcher Yarbrough, managing partner of Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, said the revitalization of downtown helped persuade his firm to come back.
"It did influence the judgment of our partners that those things are going on, particularly the reclaiming of some of the older buildings that are very nice," Mr. Yarbrough said. "This firm started out in the Mercantile complex, and we are glad to see that happen.
"There is a lot of good stuff going on downtown," he said.
With more than 8 million square feet of empty office space downtown, it will take many more leases to fill the central business district.
But real estate agents are optimistic that the tide has turned.
"The momentum continues to build downtown, and there is a lot of positive focus and a lot of money being spent," said Greg Biggs with brokerage firm Studley Inc.
"A lot of the vacant space downtown is obsolete and may never be leased for office space."
Instead, developers are turning many of those buildings into residential space.
Construction of new office space downtown is also under way, with projects to house the headquarters of 7-Eleven Inc., Hunt Consolidated and architect Corgan Associates.
"It signals that downtown is a viable place to be," said Joel Pustmueller with Peloton Real Estate Partners. "Downtown is looking like more and more of a bargain, and the better buildings are leasing first."
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

but the beers still cost $8

2005-12-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

Dallas Business Journal - 3:54 PM CST Wednesday
American Airlines Center vendor laying off 523 employees

A company that provides food and beverage service at the American Airlines Center in Dallas says it will begin laying off 523 workers in February.
Delaware North Cos. Sportservice Inc.'s concession management agreement wasn't set to expire until June 20, 2006, but the Center Operating Co., the ownership/management company for the building, has decided to exercise its right to terminate the agreement early, Sportservice said in a filing with the Texas Workforce Commission.
As a result, Sportservice said it will begin laying off the 523 employees at its American Airlines Center operation over a 14-day period beginning Feb. 15.
Dave Brown, vice president and general manager for the American Airlines Center, said the company's successor, Chicago-based Levy Restaurants Inc., and American Airlines Center's management will discuss employment opportunities with all the Sportservice employees.
"We're not unhappy with Sportservice," Brown said. "They've maintained a high quality operation going back the last 7 years ... We believe going forward Levy Restaurants is our best choice for maintaining a first-class operation for our guests at the center."
Buffalo, N.Y.-based Delaware North Cos. Inc. provides food service at sports stadiums, airports and national parks and tourist attractions through its subsidiaries. It also owns and operates racetracks through its gaming and entertainment division.
Web site: http://www.delawarenorth.com/

YOO gains stake in Victory condo project

2005-12-14T16:01:00.000-07:00

Dallas Business Journal - 12:38 PM CST Wednesday
YOO gains stake in Victory condo project
Property development company YOO said Wednesday that it has reached an agreement giving the company a 25 percent stake in a condo project in Hillwood's Victory development.
YOO already is designing the residential interiors and common spaces for "The House," a 28-story condominium project that will consist of 150 residences and 30,000 square feet of retail space on the ground level, including an upscale market, restaurants and boutiques.
The building is designed by YOO UK ltd., a London-based design, branding and marketing company run by renowned designer Philippe Starck and developer John Hitchcox.
Victory is a $3 billion-plus, 75-acre urban district in Uptown, adjacent to the West End district of downtown Dallas. At full build-out, the project will contain more than 4,000 residences and 4 million square feet of office and retail space.
Other residential components at Victory include The Vista, a 125-unit apartment complex, and The Terrace, a 95-unit condominium project. All three should be ready for occupancy in late spring 2006.
Hillwood is best known for its Alliance industrial development north of downtown Fort Worth, and the $420-million American Airlines Center near downtown Dallas.
Web site: www.hillwood.com

3838 Oak Lawn - Two Turtle Creek

2005-12-14T07:34:00.000-07:00

Two Turtle Creek sells ....everything is for sale in Uptown right now.

2005-12-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

Investment group buys office tower
Building has lots of investment potential, brokers say
12:00 AM CST on Tuesday, December 13, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

A New England investment group, the Commonfund, has purchased the Two Turtle Creek Village office tower in Dallas' Oak Lawn district.
The building near Blackburn Street and Oak Lawn Avenue was one of the first large office towers constructed along Turtle Creek. Built in 1972, the 18-story glass tower has more than 236,000 square feet.
The building sale was just completed by Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers LLC, Ron Leoni, in the firm's dispositions department confirmed Monday. Gary Carr with CB Richard Ellis brokered the sale.
Officials with Commonfund, based in Wilton, Conn., could not be reached for details about their plans for the building.
Because of the building's size and its location near Dallas' booming Uptown neighborhood, real estate brokers say the tower has a lot of investment potential.
"It's a great building and has always been a favored location for people who wanted offices close to the Park Cities," said Joel Pustmueller with Dallas-based Peloton Real Estate Partners. "That whole market has taken a spike recently in terms of rental rates.
"The average building in Turtle Creek has probably gone up $3 per square foot in the last few months," he said.
Commonfund has previously invested in the Turtle Creek market and has experience in that area. Tax records show that a Commonfund partnership owns the 13-story office tower at 3625 N. Hall St. near Oak Lawn Avenue.
Terms of the Two Turtle Creek building sale were not disclosed. The building is valued for tax purposes at $18.6 million.
The office building was constructed as part of the Turtle Creek Village complex, which includes a shopping center and second, smaller office building.
Cornerstone and the life insurance companies it represents have owned Two Turtle Creek for more than a decade.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

More on Chateau Plaza sale

2005-12-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

AmeriVest Gets $31M From JPMorgan for Chateau PlazaTuesday, December 13, 2005
By Connie Gore DALLAS-

AmeriVest Properties Inc. has sold the 171,294-sf Chateau Plaza in Uptown for $31.3 million or $183 per sf to JPMorgan Investment Management on behalf of an institutional client. The 96%-leased asset, on the market since early September, delivered a $9-million net gain for the seller.
In a press release issued late yesterday, the Denver-based AmeriVest says it will apply an estimated $29 million of cash proceeds to its secured credit facility, which will be retired when escrow balances are released by the lender. The Jones Lang LaSalle team of managing director Evan Stone, senior vice president Linda Simpson and associate Kelly Branum were marketing the class A office building at 2515 McKinney Ave., one of five AmeriVest office properties that were up for sale. According to the seller, AmeriVest Plaza in Denver will be sold before the calendar flips.
"We had very strong interest from a wide variety of buyers," Stone tells GlobeSt.com. "Investors saw the terrific dynamics in Uptown and the continued growth of rental rates and a continued improvement for a 24-hour environment."
Dean Foods Inc.'s headquarters is the largest tenant in the building. "It's a core building with a core rent roll in a core location," Stone says.
The 20-year-old Chateau Plaza sits on an acre in the heart of Uptown, within blocks of the Crescent. Dallas County has the holding assessed at $19 million.

Woodlawn Hospital Sells for $20.1 Million

2005-12-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

Dallas Business Journal - 2:13 PM CST Tuesday
Parkland finds buyer for Woodlawn propertyJennifer Gordon
Staff Writer
The Parkland Board of Managers on Tuesday approved the $20.1 million sale of the Woodlawn property in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas to Mansion House Ltd.
Mansion House does business as Metro Construction and Landscape in Dallas.
Dallas-based Parkland Health & Hospital Systems' netted $18.6 million from the sale.
The property, which is zoned to hold a 26-story building, was marketed by CB Richard Ellis Inc, a Los Angeles-based commercial real estate services company with offices in Dallas.
The hospital announced in December 2004 that it was looking to sell the property, but a variety of procedural issues slowed the sale.
Web site: www.parklandhospital.com
jgordon@bizjournals.com

"Green" Condos in the Cedar..I think this is a step in the right direction

2005-12-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

'Green' condos finding a marketProject south of downtown Dallas has lower prices
By Christine Perez
Dallas Business Journal
Updated: 7:00 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2005
When it comes to new condo development in Dallas, Buzz is breaking all the rules.
Unlike the luxury high-rise towers being built in Uptown, the $8 million, 49-unit Buzz will be a lowly four stories, situated just south of downtown in an area known as The Cedars.
There will be no swanky pools or wine cellars as amenities -- but buyers will get spiffy new electric-powered Mopeds. Buzz also will be "green," with rainwater irrigation systems, wind-powered electric service, extended overhangs to generate shade, terrazzo tiling made from recycled glass and drought-tolerant landscaping.
It's the first residential project for Dallas-based Change Chamber Development, led by Zad Roumaya and Will Pinkerton. And though The Cedars has seen redevelopment initiatives -- most notably the 1.4 million-square-foot, South Side on Lamar mixed-use complex -- Buzz is the first significant new residential construction to occur in the neighborhood in years.
Already, though, several projects are lined up behind Buzz.
Matthews Southwest, which developed the landmark South Side on Lamar and the adjacent Gilley's country music club, is working on an upscale condo project in The Cedars, as well as a boutique hotel. Multifamily developer JPI is planning to build apartments in the area. Even Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is getting in on the act, snapping up 3 acres near Gilley's in September, reportedly for an entertainment complex.
Roumaya and Pinkerton are getting $500,000 in Tax Increment Finance support from the city of Dallas for Buzz. The Cedars TIF district is bounded by Interstate 30, South Lamar, Corinth and South Harwood streets.
Roumaya, a renowned sculpture artist, first became enamored with The Cedars about seven years ago, when he redeveloped a 7,200-square-foot building at 1201 S. Akard into a studio. He later restored a loft behind The Cedars Dallas Area Rapid Transit light-rail station. When a 3/4-acre parcel across from his studio at South Akard and East Griffin became available in 2003, Roumaya snapped it up, with the goal of putting dense residential on the site.
Pinkerton, a CPA with an interest and master's degree in urban development, joined Roumaya as partner in 2004, and Buzz was born.
"Working with Zad offered the opportunity to not only introduce housing with a modern, contemporary look at an affordable price, but to incorporate energy-saving features as well," Pinkerton said. "I think it's important that we figure out how not to be so dependent on the energy sources we use right now." 'Peds dispenser'
The partners struck a deal with Green Mountain Energy to provide wind-powered electricity for Buzz. Roumaya hit on the idea of giving out electric-powered eGo Mopeds, which residents can charge at what the partners are calling a "peds dispenser" in the garage. They also created a "culture club" package that gives residents DART passes and free memberships to KERA, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Old City Park and the Dallas Museum of Art.
"We wanted to provide a connectedness to downtown and functional amenities," Roumaya said. "You can't drive a swimming pool to the office."
All but one of the Buzz condos are single story, ranging in size from about 900 to 1,250 square feet and priced at about $132,000 to $246,000. A three-story center unit also is available. Marketing kicked off in October. More than half the units have already been sold, with most buyers planning to occupy the space, as opposed to investors who are hoping to sell at a profit.
Roumaya said contract requirements are designed to dissuade investor buys. "We want to bring mortgage-holding stakeholders into The Cedars," he said.
Dallas-based KWA Construction L.P. is the general contractor for Buzz; T. Howard & Associates is the architect. Construction is expected to begin in January and wrap up before the end of 2006.
According to Cassie Gibson, managing director of market research at Residential Strategies Inc., lower land costs are helping Roumaya and Pinkerton hit the right price point.
"The pricing would need to be lower and is lower than in Uptown because of the surrounding land uses, but they're a rock's throw from downtown and are offering a lot of cool perks," Gibson said. "They're offering value and hitting a target a lot of other condo projects aren't -- young professionals who are looking for something under $200,000. The Cedars is an unproven area but, based on presales at Buzz, it's obviously something a lot of people are interested in."
Initially developed in the late 1870s as the first residential subdivision in Dallas, The Cedars lost its prominence within a few short decades, as factories moved in and affluent homeowners fled to the north.
Developer Jack Matthews, president of Matthews Southwest, was the first to bring a residential focus back to The Cedars in 2000 with his South Side on Lamar, which transformed a historic Sears, Roebuck & Co. building into a mixed-use complex that includes 455 apartment units.
"We just thought it was an undervalued area -- and it still is," Matthews said. "It's so close to downtown, but people weren't giving it a chance because it's in south Dallas. There were perceived negatives but no real negatives."
Matthews said developer interest in The Cedars has picked up dramatically in the last six months.
"It offers a great location, so close to downtown, with a DART station and great access to I-30 and I-45 and, on top of that, there's the Trinity River project, which at the end of the day may be the greatest thing to happen to Dallas in 100 years," he said. "When you add all of those things up, it's surprising that it has taken this long."
© 2005 Dallas Business Journal

Chateau Plaza - 2515 McKinney Ave.

2005-12-13T09:20:00.000-07:00

Chateau Plaza SOLD for $183/sf

2005-12-13T09:17:00.000-07:00

December 12, 2005 09:06 PM US Eastern Timezone

AmeriVest Properties Announces Sale of Chateau Plaza in Dallas DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2005--

AmeriVest Properties Inc. (AMEX:AMV) announced today that it has completed the sale of Chateau Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Chateau Plaza, a 171,294-square-foot Class A office property located in the Uptown submarket of Dallas, was sold for $31,300,000, or $183 per square foot, to a pension fund advisor. AmeriVest will record a net gain on the sale of approximately $9 million for financial reporting purposes. The estimated cash proceeds of $29 million, after closing costs and adjustments, will be used to repay indebtedness under AmeriVest's secured credit facility. With the release of certain escrow balances also held by the lender and applied to the facility, the secured facility is now paid in full.

Uptown Builder taking their show up the tollway North

2005-12-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

Townhome project will join building boom near Galleria
50 units will start at $250,000 for move-in in about a year

12:00 AM CST on Friday, December 9, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Developers are building a 50-unit townhouse community on Noel Road just two blocks from the Galleria.
Homes in the Citta Park project will start at around $250,000 and should be ready in about a year.
The two- and three-story townhouses are being constructed by Boulevard Builders, which also has projects in Dallas' Uptown and Oak Lawn neighborhoods.
"This was a good location when we started looking at it two years ago," said builder Brett Bruchmiller.
"Purely by luck it became an incredible location."
The site at the northeast corner of Noel and Southern Boulevard is in an area that's seeing a development boom.
Two more residential projects – a high-rise condo and an apartment complex – are located nearby.
Boulevard Builders' project includes a resort-style pool plus landscaped outdoor areas.
"It will be a gated, secure community," Mr. Bruchmiller said.
"We are planning on moving dirt within the next few weeks."
The traditional-style townhouses will have European-style features and will be built of brick and stucco.
"A lot of the really cool designs out there don't perform well," Mr. Bruchmiller said.
"We want our projects not only to look good but perform."
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Fort Worth's Uptown coming into shape.

2005-12-06T08:38:00.000-07:00

Corps Approval Expected
By Scott Streater, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
Dec. 3--The sweeping Trinity Uptown project is expected to clear the last major regulatory hurdle this month, allowing construction to begin next year.
This month, the Army Corps of Engineers is expected to unveil the results of its years-long study of the $435 million project, which would rechannel the Trinity River north of downtown to increase flood protection and promote economic redevelopment.
Project supporters expect the corps' environmental impact statement to recommend that the project be built.
"We are very much looking forward to getting the project moving," said Jim Oliver, general manager of the Tarrant Regional Water District, which is spearheading the project.
The Trinity Uptown project, meanwhile, continues to receive federal money.
Congress approved two bills last month that earmarked $7.8 million for design and construction work and for trails associated with the development. That follows congressional approval in July of a transportation bill that included $12.8 million for construction and design of two bridges.
The project's price tag will be split evenly among federal appropriations and local funding sources.
Trinity Uptown is among the largest proposed developments in Fort Worth since Dallas/Fort Worth Airport was built during the early 1970s.
Project supporters say it would revitalize what some call an aging strip of businesses along North Main Street, attracting an estimated $1 billion in development. Rechanneling the river would create two islands and a 33-acre lake north of downtown. Planners envision upscale condominiums, parks and restaurants, with the river as the centerpiece.
Planners say the project's chief aim, however, is to prevent a rare catastrophic flood by replacing the levee system, which has protected Fort Worth for decades. The replacement would be a 1 1/2 -mile-long bypass channel to carry floodwaters away from downtown.
But the channel would cut through existing businesses, requiring more than 80 business owners to sell and move.
Brad Williams, co-owner of Omaha Surplus on White Settlement Road, is among them. Like other affected business owners, he feels that he was left out of the decision-making that could uproot his company from its home of 42 years.
Further angering people such as Williams is that the corps had developed a much-cheaper alternative to Trinity Uptown that would have restored adequate flood protection without relocating businesses.
Project backers rejected that alternative because they want to remove the earthen levees that have long obscured river views.
-----
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Copyright (c) 2005, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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Story from REDORBIT NEWS:

To see a real "walking neighborhood" check this out.

2005-12-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

Click here for Texas Bird's-eye view of Dallas in 1872. The road in the upper left hand corner that is angling off into the woods is McKinney Avenue.

Beige Book Shows Economy Expanding

2005-12-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

Market Features
Beige Book Shows Economy Expanding
By TSC Staff11/30/2005 2:57 PM ESTURL: http://www.thestreet.com/markets/marketfeatures/10255121.html
Economic activity in the U.S. continued to expand from mid-October through the middle of November, according to the Federal Reserve, which released reports from its 12 member banks Wednesday.
The reports, which make up what's known as the beige book, showed that manufacturing and services activity increased in most districts. Retail sales rose in many locations as well, but several district banks reported only modest year-over-year gains.
The beige book is based on information collected before Nov. 21 and summarizes remarks the Fed banks collect from businesses and other contacts. The report isn't meant to serve as a commentary on the views of the central bank's officials.
Most districts reported producer pricing pressure and concerns about high energy costs. Consumer prices increased moderately in some districts, with reports mixed on firms' ability to pass through their higher costs. The bulk of districts reported climbing input prices, particularly of energy-related products, raw materials and transportation.
Luxury items, electronics and food tended to be strong sellers, while winter apparel was weak. Auto sales were on the sluggish side; at least some of this was attributed to a lack of new incentive programs or the ending of pricing discounts.
Manufacturing activity picked up in all districts except St. Louis, where activity was mixed.
Residential real estate markets generally remained upbeat, but many districts reported slowing activity. Residential mortgage lending was down in several districts, while stronger commercial real estate markets were found by many of the banks, the Fed said.
Home sales were reported to have eased off in the Philadelphia, Richmond and Cleveland districts. Housing sales remained fairly strong in New York City, but the New York district reported that sales in New Jersey had moderated and that inventories were high.
Both the Chicago and Atlanta districts reported flat home sales, and excess inventories were noted in the Kansas City district, though sales there were up slightly. St. Louis and Dallas said home sales were strong in most metro areas, and San Francisco said sales continued at a rapid clip.
Commercial real estate markets strengthened in Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Kansas City, but the Boston area was unchanged.
Hiring activity mostly increased, and some of the regional banks noted a slight tightening in their labor markets. Overall, upward pressure on wages was modest.

Uptown style heading North up 75.....thats the way we roll.

2005-11-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

Part of Telecom Corridor to change course
Urban-style retail, office and apartment project planned for Richardson
08:48 PM CST on Tuesday, November 29, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
RICHARDSON – More than 200,000 cars drive by the southeast corner of North Central Expressway and Campbell Road every day. Developers are planning to give them a reason to stop.
Three firms are teaming up to build a $90 million town center project at the busy intersection.
The Eastside development will contain an urban-style shopping center, more than 400 apartments and office space built around a two-acre park.
Developers Greenway Investment Co., Fobare Commercial and Post Properties Inc. got approvals this week from the city of Richardson and plan to break ground next summer.

Greenway Investment The Eastside mixed-use development will be at the southeast corner of North Central Expressway and Campbell Road in Richardson.
"We saw this property a couple of years ago and couldn't believe there were almost 30 acres to redevelop at this intersection," said Gerald Stool, chief executive of Greenway Investment.
It will construct more than a half-dozen retail and office buildings in the project.
"You have all these people working in the area," he said, "but you don't have the type of mixed-use developments we have in Uptown, Southlake or some of the other cities."
The Eastside development is about a 10-minute walk from two of DART's light rail stations.
To make the stroll more pleasant, a $1.5 million improvement project will upgrade and landscape the walkways running along the east side of North Central between the DART stops.
"Our hope is to [eventually] take it all the way down to Spring Valley," said Richardson City Manager Bill Keffler.
The 90,000-square-foot retail center will be designed by architect O'Brien and Associates and leased by the Retail Connection.
About half the space will be leased to restaurants, Mr. Stool said.
Next to the shops, Atlanta-based Post Properties will build a four-story, 425-unit apartment complex with ground-floor retail. Post has done similar projects in Uptown, Addison and Plano.
"We see a huge demand for the rental units, and it's a great retail location," said Post executive vice president David Ward. "We're filling a slot that's been left vacant thanks to the change in the office market."
BGO Architects of Dallas designed the Post project.
The heart of Eastside is an existing 10-story office tower.
An investment partnership represented by Dallas-based Fobare Commercial bought the former Ericsson tower and its 1,000-car parking garage in 2001.
The company also owns a one-story office complex farther south that will be phase two of the project.
"Initially the planned development was for 1 million square feet of office buildings," said company principal Tod Fobare. But since the tech sector crash, the Telecom Corridor has had an oversupply of office space.
"What Richardson was missing was an amenity for the office buildings with quality restaurants and retail," he said.
The huge parking garage in the center of the development also helped the deal move forward, he said.
Richardson mayor Gary Slagel said the Telecom Corridor office district is perfect for retail and residential.
"We have gone around the country and seen things like this," he said. "This project combines all the elements."
Fobare and Dallas-based Greenway also bought the Chase Bank Tower and surrounding 12 acres at North Central and Belt Line Road in Richardson and have a commercial building under contract on Greenville Avenue across from the Eastside site.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Condo Craziness makes the news.

2005-11-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

EXCLUSIVE REPORTS DBJ
From the November 25, 2005 print edition

Condos going up at a frenzie
Most developers are aiming at high-dollar buyers seeking luxury

Christine Perez
Staff Writer

The condo craze that's sweeping through the coastal markets is taking hold in Dallas. Developers have kicked off construction of more than 20 projects that will add 2,600 new units in Uptown and the urban core.
Another 1,100 units are poised to break ground, including a 21-story, 70-unit addition to the historic Stoneleigh Hotel and a 300-unit conversion of Maple Terrace, a Turtle Creek landmark.
Most are luxury developments, targeting buyers who don't mind paying $400,000 or more for a 1,000-square-foot high-rise home. The priciest offerings are found at the W Dallas Victory Hotel & Residence, Residences at the Ritz-Carlton, Cresta Bella and One Arts Plaza, where units are going for an average of $400 to $650 per square foot.
So far, early sales success has stunned the experts.
Hillwood, which is developing about 500 condominiums in four projects at Victory, its massive mixed-use development surrounding American Airlines Center, has contracts out on 75% to 85% of its units in the W Hotel and The Terrace. About half of the units in its newest tower, The House, have been put on reserve.
According to local real estate sources, strong condo sales at the Residences at Ritz-Carlton, under construction on McKinney Avenue, is leading developer Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. to add a second tower on the site.
"It's baffling to me," said Cassie Gibson, managing director of market research at Dallas-based Residential Strategies Inc. "Developments under construction are all selling well, and every day more people are announcing new projects. They don't seem to be worried that there's no historical data to support this amount of supply in the market.
"More than anything else, I think early successes in other real estate markets is creating confidence," Gibson said. "Developers think Dallas is going to be the next Miami or the next Las Vegas."
Busting boundaries
Until recently, condo development in Dallas was concentrated in the Turtle Creek area, with luxury high-rise projects targeting Preston Hollow and Park Cities empty-nesters, who wanted a maintenance-free lifestyle with a prestigious address. Then Hillwood announced its W Hotel Victory project in mid-2003, and things snowballed from there.
Besides the W, four other new urban condo projects are tied to hotels: The Residences at the Ritz Carlton, Cresta Bella, adjacent to The Mansion on Turtle Creek, ZaZa Metropolitan Club, which adjoins Hotel ZaZa, and the condo tower addition planned for the Stoneleigh Hotel.
Some developers are looking at using condos to kick off office projects, including Craig Hall, who is planning a 47-story tower in downtown Dallas. One Arts Plaza, a 24-story, $100 million office tower under construction in the Arts District, will be topped by seven floors of condo space.
David Griffin of David Griffin & Co., who is marketing the One Arts Plaza condos for developer Billingsley Co., said the office component has not been a turn-off for potential buyers.
"The spirit of the urban environment is very appealing to them," he said.
Because 7-Eleven Inc. has signed on to lease about 250,000 square feet of office space at One Arts Plaza, the project isn't dependent on condo presales, Griffin said.
"A lot of other developers have to have a certain number of units under contract before construction can begin," he said. "Because of the commitment from 7-Eleven, we know we'll be able to begin delivering condos in May of 2007."
According to early statistics, about 25% to 30% of Dallas urban condo-buyers are out-of-town investors. So far, though, this hasn't created the hyper-inflation of pricing that's occurring in some other markets, said Mike Puls, president of Dallas-based Foley & Puls Inc.
"Those are monopolistic economies," he said. "The economics in Dallas are different; they're real. Condos are still being sold at the prices they were selling at a year ago. For the hyper price-appreciation to happen here, you'd need a limited supply."
Puls called Dallas an "unsophisticated, emerging condo market." He said the initial outlook is good, provided job-growth predictions are on the mark. Still, one challenge to overcome is the lack of diversity among product offerings.
"We have too much of the same thing," Puls said. "Developers are all designing their products for the same reason; unfortunately, it's the wrong reason. They're doing small units at high prices with the goal of making the most money. But the higher you get, the more narrow the market gets. And if you create an oversupply in a product line, you'll have diminishing returns. It's pure economics."
Developers who design their projects around maximizing dirt costs could falter, Puls said.
"They need to tie their products to the customer base," he said. "The target market is paying for the products. I think that's a better idea."
cperez@bizjournals.com 214-706-7120

Street Construction down town will take years...hmmmmm bvut they are still talking about the Woodall Rodgers park so that is good.

2005-11-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

Dallas: Expensive street work will take years

09:46 PM CST on Wednesday, November 23, 2005
By DAVE LEVINTHAL / The Dallas Morning News

No one would mistake downtown Dallas' streets as paved with gold, and some don't appear to be paved with much at all. Years of cars and trucks and utility cuts have beaten what once was business-district blacktop into a bumpy mess.

City officials know. And the time to do something about it, they say, is now.

During the next several years, downtown streets will undergo a public bond-funded transformation as several dozen blocks of worn-out north-south roads are reconstructed, said David Dybala, Dallas' director of public works and transportation.

Along with other downtown infrastructure projects ranging from streetscaping to a proposed "deck park" spanning Woodall Rodgers Freeway between Uptown and the Arts District, the street replacement project might help spark the kind of residential and retail growth for which city leaders yearn.

The City Council this year ranked economic development, particularly downtown, as its top priority.

Voters in 2003 approved issuing nearly $200 million in bonds to fund street and transportation improvements throughout Dallas, with many of them downtown.

"This is the biggest infrastructure effort to address needs in the central business district," Mr. Dybala said. "It's necessary. We have some streets that really need work."

The plan calls for Harwood, St. Paul, Ervay and Akard streets to be rebuilt between Young Street and Ross Avenue. Dallas will also redo Field Street between Wood Street and Ross Avenue, and Main Street to Central Expressway as well as several smaller road segments throughout the city's increasingly vibrant urban core.

Decorative street lighting and sidewalk enhancements, some of which has already commenced, also are slated for some streets.

Likely byproducts of these improvements include increased noise and congestion, Mr. Dybala said.

"But we're going to try our best to minimize inconvenience," he said.

Don Raines, for one, hopes so.

As one of downtown's few full-time residents in the 1990s, Mr. Raines said he recalls numerous nights when the all-but-empty central business district was buzzing with jackhammers and heavy equipment chopping up streets to install data lines and other infrastructure.

Problem was, his bedroom sat directly above.

"Man, it was pretty bad," said Mr. Raines, president of the Downtown Neighborhood Association. "When the telecom bust happened, it wasn't good for them, but we all slept a lot better."

No longer is downtown home to a few hundred urban pioneers. About 3,000 residents live there, and city officials expect that number to increase at least threefold in the next decade.

All the more reason, Swirll winery co-owner Louis Davion said, to invest in downtown's infrastructure sooner rather than later.

"There's going to be some pain – disruption of traffic, noise," said Mr. Davion, who opened his business on Main Street last year and caters to downtown residents. "If the construction keeps people from moving downtown and living downtown, that'll affect our business and other businesses. But we definitely need the improvements. Ultimately, they'll have a positive effect."

At least one fledgling business, however, found downtown infrastructure improvements too disruptive to bear.

Streetside Cafe, a lunch spot across Ervay Street from the J. Erik Jonsson Library, closed indefinitely last month in part because infrastructure improvements decimated nearby on-street parking, owner Kathy Vergos said.

"You might as well just buck up and do it now, though," said Joe Marchant, executive director for the Dallas Building Owners and Managers Association. "Everybody's at the point to accept the fact that there will be disruption, but that hopefully, the disruption is minimal and worth it. When you see the city making an investment in infrastructure, and businesses see the city in for the long haul, it's a major incentive to relocate or stay."

In years past, utility cuts have scarred downtown streets with bone-jarring results: Once-smooth blacktop almost overnight became uneven and plenty unpleasant to drive on.

To ensure that Dallas' infrastructure investment is preserved, Mr. Dybala says, the city intends to strictly enforce street cutting codes that govern where and how utility companies may cut into city rights of way to access underground lines.

In the meantime, the city is increasing efforts through its street services department to combat crumbling curbs, potholes and street-cut damage, said Forest Turner, the department's director.

With more downtown storefronts filling up and more residents moving in, "We have a different kind of customer now that is going to want a certain service level maybe the city hasn't provided before," Mr. Turner said.

Part of providing better street services, he said, is simply walking from downtown business to downtown business asking owners what needs to be fixed, so problems are addressed immediately.

"We can't wait for a call to come to us through the 311 system or something," Mr. Turner said. "If we fix our streets, then we have to maintain our streets just the same."

E-mail dlevinthal@dallasnews.com

NCX Building Sells

2005-11-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

Hartman REIT Scoops Up 253,981-SF Amberton Tower for $17MWednesday, November 23, 2005 By Connie Gore
DALLAS-Picking up a play for a fallen-out contract, Hartman Commercial Properties REIT has acquired the 253,981-sf Amberton Tower from Aslan Investment Fund, led by Chicago-based Transwestern Investment Services. According to SEC documents, the exchange went down for $16.95 million plus closing costs.
"I got what I wanted for the price I wanted," John Crossin, chief investment officer for the Houston-based REIT, tells GlobeSt.com. "We think it's a very excellent purchase." The 12-story office building at 4144 N. Central Expressway has been on the market since mid-March along with Aslan's only other holding in Dallas, the 224,879-sf Concourse Office Park at 6310-90 LBJ Freeway.
Crossin says the 35 to 40 leases in the class B-plus office building are "very spread out over the next four years." The SEC filing shows the annual base rent is slightly more than $3 million. As for the pro forma, he says the empty space, roughly 32,000 sf, will come to market for $15 per sf and most likely a tenant-improvement stipend of $10 per sf. The going rate in the submarket is $17 per sf to $17.50 per sf. As always, Hartman will lease and manage the building, set on nearly three acres within eyeshot of the freeway.
Crossin says the leasing prospects are good: Transwestern brokers have "three or four" prospects to bring to the table plus some existing tenants are talking about expansions. The 75%-leased Amberton Tower's lead tenants are Brockette/Davis/Drake Inc. and US Oncology. The engineering firm leases 21,000 sf under stair-stepped terms that expire April 20, 2011 while the healthcare network's headquarters fills 19,000 sf in an escalating lease through Dec. 31, 2008.
Crossin says Hartman picked up the deal after another contract fell out although he was told there were seven other would-be buyers in line for Amberton Tower, built in 1982 and renovated in 1993. "I love the building and the location," he says, adding he figures it's close enough to Uptown and Turtle Creek that the leasing team can draw on its neighbors' synergies.
Transwestern's Steve Simon represented Aslan while Crossin and Hartman's Dave Wheeler negotiated the takeover terms for the REIT's fourth acquisition in Dallas in two years. Crossin says he's not holding any more contracts, but there's still time for an end-of-the-year deal, just like the REIT's done for three consecutive years by jumping on sales with less than 30 days before the clock ran out.

Dallas Outlook Not Promising Much Change

2005-11-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

RealShare EXCLUSIVE: Dallas Outlook Not Promising Much Change

Thursday, November 17, 2005 By Connie Gore DALLAS-

Rents are starting to rise. Vacancy is below 20%, at last. And there are plenty of buyers on the ground and horizon. But just like last year, it's only in micro-markets and not across the board in Dallas/Fort Worth, industry experts concur.
Looking deep into what makes Dallas/Fort Worth tick, an estimated 300 industry leaders were on hand for the fourth annual RealShare Conference Series, held at the Hilton Lincoln Centre in North Dallas. In a fast-paced format of information-sharing sessions, Michael G. Desiato, editor in chief for Real Estate Media Network, parent of Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com, promised the attendees at the start of the day that they'd learn "what's going on and how to position yourself going forward."
Whether it was keynote speaker Donnie Nelson, president of basketball operations for the Dallas Mavericks and partner in the Frisco Square development, or Bill Cawley, chairman and CEO of locally based GVA Cawley, the advice was the same: build relationships and work hard to keep deals flowing. "It's more a work ethic business than brainpower business," Cawley said. "And, it's more relationships than brainpower."
Cawley talked about his struggles and successes to Desiato for this year's Inside the Real Estate Mind. Cawley said principles, faith and family are his priorities today. "When nobody's looking, you've got to be doing the right thing," he said.
Cawley, like others in yesterday's limelight, cautioned investors and developers alike to choose their markets carefully. From his perspective, the present winners are Richardson, Uptown and the Dallas North Tollway. The "challenged" markets are LBJ Freeway and Stemmons Corridor. And, he cautioned, playing the terrain in Las Colinas is for those who get in early and get out early. "People are buying in Dallas and they don't know the market," he said. His newest "journey" is raising a fund to buy distressed real estate in Portland, Orange County, Sacramento, Northern California, Denver, Houston and naturally, Dallas.
Buyers like BentleyForbes Group and Younan Properties Inc. like what they see in the DFW marketplace, but their top executives say it's not been easy to get the right piece for the portfolio. Though buying habits differ greatly, Zaya Younan, founder and CEO of the Woodland Hills, CA-based Younan Properties, and David Cobb, president and CEO of BentleyForbes, say whether it's now or three years from now, they'll wish they had bought more Dallas office buildings.
"Local investors are trapped in the history that we have and the outside investor sees the opportunity," said Tim Speck, regional managing director for Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Brokerage Co. and part of the investment sales panel that included Younan, Cobb and a third buyer in town, Ronald Miller, managing partner for Meridian Global Investors.
All three buyers agree that to play in Dallas requires doing extra legwork because submarket conditions vary so widely. "You've go to be very cautious in this market," Miller said.
As moderator of the investment sales panel, Russell Ingrum, executive vice president with CB Richard Ellis Inc., took a pulse reading on interest rates, present and predictions for the future. The consensus is retiring Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan will take one more shot before his exit, allowing his replacement, Ben Bernanke, to have a relatively quiet first year for his reign.
In the town hall meeting, panelists agreed office and industrial conditions have improved somewhat over last year, but again it's only in select markets. "This year definitely is no worse than last year, said Jeff Thornton, leasing director for Indianapolis-based Duke Realty Corp. "It is improving, but it's not dramatic."
Richard Pogue, executive managing director for CBRE, moderated the town hall which pitted an office tenant rep, Bob Mohr of Mohr Partners Inc., against an office developer, Greg Fuller, managing director for Granite Properties, for a brief point-counterpoint discussion about vacancy versus construction. As Fuller pointed out, construction and rent hikes aren't justified for many parts of Dallas, but there are pockets like the far north that validate reasons to build and tack on higher rates. And, he added, there are "definitely real deals" in the market unlike last year's sundry tire kickers.
An office panel, moderated by Carl Ewert, executive vice president for the Staubach Co, pointed out that Dallas historically is a tenants' market and that's not likely to change anytime soon. Overall vacancy needs to drop three to four more points before "all rents start to rise," explained Kim Butler, executive vice president for Transwestern Commercial Services. "We're in equilibrium now. It will be late 2006 before we see some change."
The panelists, for the most part, agreed local growth patterns will be slower than the norm and absorption for the near term will come from existing tenants and not relos. Still, there are encouraging signs--financial firms that left the city five and 10 years ago are now coming back, said Matt Craft with Trammell Crow Co. "At some point, owners will start pushing rents," he said.

Kinky Speaks

2005-11-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

Kinky Friedman Puts Platform Before North Texas Industrial, Office Brokers
Wednesday, November 16, 2005 By Connie Gore DALLAS-

Independent candidate Kinky Friedman, seizing an opportunity to replace Gov. Rick Perry as keynote speaker for the North Texas SIOR Chapter, laid out a common-sense platform to a record-breaking crowd, adeptly showing his chutzpah for a gubernatorial run isn't without substance.
When word got out that Friedman was replacing the governor on the dais, reservations spiked and tables sold out, attracting 650 SIOR members and guests to the Westin Galleria event in North Dallas. Though the delivery was light on the commercial real estate industry, the Texas-bred author, musician and political satirist--a modern-day mix of Mark Twain and Will Rogers--scored some solid slam dunks with a voting constituency perceived most often as straight party line.
"The people I'm talking to are saying they think the Republicans and Democrats have let us down," Friedman said. At the top of his platform are issues like education, the US-Mexico border and biodiesel fuel development. There's also support for legalized gambling, prayer in school, gay marriage and a 1% surcharge on big oil and gas companies to generate up to $2 billion for his "Trust for Texas Heroes," a coffer dedicated to funding salary hikes for teachers, firefighters and police.
"Education and the border are the two issues that this governor has ignored," Friedman said. He advocated educators "stop teaching to the TAKS test" plus endorsed a bilateral exchange that taps oil-rich Mexico's reserves for life on the Texas side of the border as a means to help quash illegal immigration. The existing policy "has got to change," he said. "We have to close the border in order reopen it again. I suppose the governor is waiting for the feds. Texas has never waited for anybody to help us. We aren't going to do this conventionally."
It's widely recognized border changes will have to be gingerly addressed. Texas' maquiladora trade alone carries an economic clout of close to $250 billion for the US and Mexico. The maquiladora industrial space, with more on the way each day, exceeds 141 million sf in El Paso, Santa Teresa, Juarez, Laredo, Nuevo Laredo, McAllen and Reynosa.
"People are frustrated all over the state because nothing has been delivered," Friedman said. "Republicans and Democrats will keep the insider games going until there's an alternative on the ballot." He must collect 50,000 signatures, beginning March 8, to earn a berth on the ballot. Under Texas law, party-registered voters who sign his petition are barred from casting ballots in the May primary election.

Boom at Maple Terrace

2005-11-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

GlobeSt.com EXCLUSIVE: JV Details $50M-Plus Redevelopment Plan
Wednesday, November 16, 2005 By Connie Gore
(To read more on the multifamily market, click here.)

DALLAS-After a year of due diligence, High Street Residential, a Trammell Crow Co. subsidiary, has come up with a $50-million-plus plan to renovate the 80-year-old Maple Terrace Apartments into condos and add a 16-story residential tower and eight townhouses to the 3.35-acre landmark property in Uptown.
High Street and JER Partners, the McLean, VA-based division of JE Robert Cos., acquired the 80-unit Maple Terrace Apartments at 3001 Maple Ave. at the end of the third quarter from Dallas-based Circa Capital Inc. With the deal now done, the developer has scheduled sales to begin in March. Prices have yet to be firmed up, but the best guess is they will run from $300 per sf to $350 per sf, a price point not commonly found among the upscale rental and condo stock in Uptown and Turtle Creek. "We feel like we will be at a good price point," says Harry Lake, TCC's development manager. "It's a good value that's not currently being met in the market."
Lake tells GlobeSt.com that construction will begin next summer, possibly early fall, for the renovation as well as the new tower, which will have 11 stories of condos atop five floors of parking to replace surface spaces. The development group has mapped out 53 condos for the existing 80-unit building, 162 condos in the tower and eight two-story townhouses--all positioned around an Italianesque courtyard. Units will begin delivering a year after construction starts.
Lake says Maple Terrace's occupancy historically hovered 80%, but as word got out about the plan "people starting getting on the list so they could have a position in line." The existing tenants, some there more than 50 years, get first dibs on the condos and moving assistance plus a place to stay during construction. Given the demand, he says it's highly likely the project could sell out before the one- and two-bedroom units come on line.
Rhonda St. James, the Maple Terrace sales manager for Chicago-based Garrison Partners Inc., says negotiations are under way with apartment properties in the area and moving companies to make the move-outs as easy as possible on tenants. All existing leases will be honored, she stresses. Only "two or three" apartments are vacant.
Lake says the redevelopment will cost at least $50 million and could push $100 million. By gaming out a condo plan, the development group is able to save the landmark building although it would have been cheaper to raze it. "We wanted to find a way to save the building," he explains. "It's worth spending the extra money to keep it. We're preserving a lot of the character."
High Street Residential is led by Art Lomenick, one of the region's most formidable luxury multifamily property developers. RTKL Associates Inc.'s Dallas office did the landscape design. WDG Habib Architecture Inc. of Washington, DC, which has a local office, has crafted the redevelopment design.

Eventually someone will get blocked .....Right?

2005-11-14T06:16:00.000-07:00

Don't block their window on Dallas
As more high-rises go up, more condo owners fight to save views
12:00 AM CST on Friday, November 11, 2005
How's the view out your window?
About all I can see out the front of my house is a 30-foot holly bush that keeps the summer sun at bay. It also blocks the sight of the McMansion across the street – not a bad thing – and gives me a lot of privacy.
Of course, if I'm paying $300 or $400 a foot to buy in one of those fancy Uptown high-rises, I probably don't want to stare at a holly bush. The residential towers going up on Dallas' near north side brag about their views of the skyline.
But what happens when there are so many high-rises that the million-dollar view is looking at the building next door?
It's already a worry for folks who want to live the high life along Turtle Creek and McKinney Avenue.
Each time a new tower is announced, the neighbors get antsy about losing their view.
This fight has been going on for decades in Manhattan and Southern California. With the high-rise condo craze that's swept the nation, the battle has spread to places as disparate as Minneapolis and Las Vegas.
So are you surprised that plans for a McKinney Avenue high-rise have stirred up the view police in Uptown?
Houston developer Hanover Co. plans to erect a spiffy apartment tower on the vacant lot at McKinney and St. Paul Street. That's riled some of the owners of nearby buildings who worry that their vantage of downtown will be obscured. They are opposing the developer at City Hall in hopes of quashing the deal. Good luck.
A few years ago, we couldn't beg, borrow or pay people to come back to the downtown area. Now residents are fighting to preserve their view of the town.
I guess that's progress. And the Uptown building boom ensures that such dust-ups will become more common in the years ahead.
Court rulings have been pretty consistent in allowing landowners to build even if it blocks their neighbors' view. Don't believe it when your project's developer "promises" nothing will ever be built next door – ever is a long time, so you'd better get it in writing.
And unlike my holly bush, you can't lop the top off the tower across the street just because it's in the way.
Texas is tops
When it comes to business investment, you can't top Texas.
A new report by Ernst & Young found that Texas topped the nation in business facilities investment last year with a total of $13 billion.
That's more than double second-place Michigan. Ohio, California and New York also trail the Lone Star state.
The biggest project on Ernst & Young's report is the new Texas Instruments plant in Richardson. And Countrywide Financial Group's new Telecom Corridor regional office also made the list.
"It's my business not to be surprised by this kind of thing," said Bruce Rutherford, who heads real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle's Texas regional office. "But most people who don't follow this would be surprised.
"Texas is attracting a lot of larger industrial installations," he said.
The new business facilities in North Texas created about 11,500 jobs.

Condos up next for D.R. Horton?

2005-11-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Condos up next for D.R. Horton?
Builder to venture into high-rise market with Uptown tower
12:00 AM CST on Thursday, November 10, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

D.R. Horton – the country's largest homebuilder – is plotting a move into the high-rise residential market.
The Fort Worth-based builder has teamed up with a Bedford developer who plans to construct an Uptown condo tower.
The project is still in the planning stages, but word about it is widespread among real estate brokers. D.R. Horton officials did not return phone calls or e-mails.
Planned for a block at McKinney Avenue and Akard Street, the 21-story project is one of two residential buildings proposed for the site by Centurion American Development Group.
Centurion is designing a building with about 150 units, which D.R. Horton would build out.
"We are just building the shell," said Centurion president Mehrdad Moayedi. Horton will then finish out the condominiums "a floor or two at a time," he said.
"It will be another 30 or 40 days before we have an announcement."
The building site also has room for a second, 10-story condominium plus a free-standing restaurant, Mr. Moayedi said.
Horton builds more than 50,000 homes a year in 23 states. Although most of the company's construction is traditional single-family homes, the builder is increasing its offerings in higher-density housing, including townhomes.
"We have talked to a few builders that have looked at this concept," said Ted Wilson, an industry analyst with Dallas' Residential Strategies Inc. "With the competition in this market, a lot of builders are venturing into new areas."
Mr. Wilson said a company such as Horton could be a formidable competitor in the high-rise condo market.
"You have a Wall Street company acting as a principal in this," he said. "You also have Horton's strength in marketing."
Few traditional builders have entered the booming high-rise residential market, but condominium sales are surpassing single-family home activity in select U.S. locations.
"It doesn't surprise me that the big builders are moving in that direction – especially in markets where condo product has proven to have a lot deeper demand than single-family," said long-time Dallas housing analyst Ron Witten.
"The big builders are eager to maximize their volumes."
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Crosstex Q3

2005-11-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

LATEST NEWS
Dallas Business Journal - 2:50 PM CST Tuesday
Crosstex posts narrower 3Q profit
Crosstex Energy L.P.'s third-quarter profit dropped, hurt by an options trading charge.
The Dallas-based partnership reported net income of $1.1 million compared to third-quarter 2004 net income of $5.9 million.
On a per share basis, the company reported a net loss for the quarter of 5 cents a share, compared to net income of 24 cents a share in third-quarter 2004.
The 2005 results include an $11.5 million charge related to how it valued options trades before they were complete. The charge would have been larger if not for an $8 million gain on a property sale that partially offset the loss.
The company's revenue rose to $782.8 million from $509.5 million a year ago.
Crosstex Energy L.P. (Nasdaq: QTEX) is a midstream natural gas company that operates pipeline and processing plants. Crosstex Energy Inc. (Nasdaq: XTXI) owns 2 percent general partner interest and a 44 percent limited partner interest in Crosstex Energy L.P.
Web site: www.crosstexenergy.com

Congrats to the new CEO of Holly Corp.

2005-11-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

LATEST NEWS
Dallas Business Journal - 12:15 PM CST Monday
Holly Corp. names new CEO
Holly Corp. has appointed Matthew P. Clifton its chief executive officer, effective Jan. 1, 2006.
Clifton, who has served as the company's president since 1995, replaces Lamar Norsworthy, who will transition out of the CEO role at the end of the year to focus on his responsibilities as chairman.
Clifton, who has been with Holly Corp. for more than 20 years, previously served as senior vice president of Holly Corp. from 1991 to 1995, and vice president of economics, engineering and legal affairs from 1988 to 1991.
Clifton also currently serves as chairman and CEO of Holly Energy Partners L.P., a limited partnership in which Holly Corp. has a 45 percent interest.
Dallas-based Holly Corp. (NYSE: HOC) is an independent petroleum refiner and marketer.
Web site: www.hollycorp.com

2005-11-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Sterling at Turtle Creek.

For more info on the Senior Living Condos on Lee Park...

2005-11-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Click here www.thesterlingturtlecreek.com .

I will try to post a rendering as well. It is called The Sterling at Turtle Creek. The ad in Sundays DMN said "The first of its kind - Twenty-two stories of beautifully designed interiors offer a variety of floor plans"

Great article on the Merc deal and how Jack Gosnell paved the way.

2005-11-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

Making over 'the Merc'
The redevelopment of the Mercantile Bank complex on main street is set to give another major boost to downtown Dallas' reviva
lChristine Perez
Staff Writer
Dallas commercial real estate broker Jack Gosnell isn't one to take no for an answer.
For nearly a year, he hounded executives at Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, trying to get them to take on a massive renovation of the Mercantile Bank complex on Main Street. The four-building, 1 million-square-foot project, located in the heart of downtown Dallas across from Neiman Marcus' flagship store, had sat vacant for more than 20 years.
"It was a huge blight and was stymieing downtown improvement efforts," Gosnell said. "You'd drive past Neiman Marcus and all of a sudden find yourself in Beirut."
This month, Gosnell's efforts will begin to pay off, as Forest City closes on the Mercantile property and begins work on a $250 million redevelopment that ultimately will transform three city blocks.
Over the years, Gosnell, a United Commercial Realty broker who specializes in the Uptown and downtown submarkets, had watched in frustration as three separate efforts to redevelop "the Merc" became derailed. The missing element, Gosnell decided, was a developer that specialized in complicated, urban endeavors. In early 2003, with the Urban Land Institute's help, Gosnell zeroed in on Forest City.
His first call to David Levey, the company's executive vice president, lasted about 15 seconds.
"When he found out I was calling from Dallas, it was the end of the conversation," Gosnell said. " 'You don't have any barriers to entry, you don't have entitlement issues and every other guy in the telephone book is a real estate developer,' he told me. 'We're not coming to Dallas.' "
Undaunted, Gosnell continued to pepper Levey with phone calls, e-mails and newspaper articles about downtown developments.
After about a year of being pestered, Levey found himself in Texas for a business conference. He gave Gosnell a call.
"Don't flatter yourself; I'm here for other reasons," he said. "But I'm going to give you 24 hours to convince me we should do this project."
Gosnell picked up Levey in his car and gave him a quick windshield tour of the Mercantile complex and the central business district before driving him to a meeting with Dallas Mayor Laura Miller.
"How do you like our fair city?" Miller asked, as Levey walked into her office.
"Fair city?" he said. "It's a disaster. It's like a Fellini movie -- there's no people in it."
Miller laughed.
"I like you," she said. "You tell me the truth."
Launched by the Ratowczer (later changed to Ratner) family in 1921, Forest City (NYSE: FCE) now has about $7.4 billion in assets. The developer is laser-focused on urban areas in high-growth markets like New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver, California and Washington, D.C.
Complex project
"If there's one thing Forest City knows, it's that central cores of cities are very important," Levey said. "Dallas is really a Top 10 or 12 city as far as population and size. It deserves to have a vibrant downtown."
On the surface, Dallas didn't fit Forest City's criteria, but the Mercantile complex was exactly what the company looks for.
"It's just what we do -- a big complex project that has entitlement issues and extremely difficult barriers to entry due to the historic nature of the structures," Levey said. "We also sensed a change in the political winds, a great willingness at the executive level to use the tools of government to help spur urban development.
"On top of that, Dallas is a great place to do business," Levey said. "Put all those things into the hopper, and the project made sense."
What began with just the Mercantile soon grew to include other nearby structures -- the 250,000-square-foot Continental Building and the four-building Atmos Energy complex -- totaling about 2 million square feet of obsolete office space. Forest City wanted to have more of an impact on the downtown market, and knew expanding the project would help justify the significant economic development support it was seeking from the city of Dallas.
In August 2005, nearly two years after Levey made his first trek to Dallas, and after several starts and stops, the city council unanimously approved $70 million in incentives to help support Forest City's $250 million redevelopment project.
Fresh ideas
The 33-story clock tower within the Mercantile complex will be preserved and redeveloped into 225 apartments. The three remaining buildings will be torn down, replaced by retail space, a parking garage and a new 12-story, 150-unit apartment building. The Continental building will be transformed into 240 condo units. All three projects are scheduled for completion in about two years.
Forest City will then turn its attention to the Atmos Energy complex, which will be redeveloped into 222 condo or apartment units, depending on market demand.
The company is working with San Francisco-based Ideo to develop a design strategy for the residential units.
"Ideo is a marketing think tank that is very clever and has young, fresh ideas," Levey said. "We're not doing traditional apartments. They're going to be very different -- something Dallas has never seen before."
Levey said Forest City will be ready to detail the plans in early 2006.
The renovation of the Mercantile complex will have a profound impact on the downtown office-leasing market, said James Quick with NAI/Stoneleigh Huff Brous McDowell.
"For years it has been the city's biggest problem because it's right across from Neiman Marcus and Bank One Center, the second-most-expensive office building in Dallas," he said. "Having the Mercantile sit vacant next to two of our best downtown assets has been a real tragedy."
Forest City's success will help lure new office tenants -- and other developers -- to the urban core, Quick said.
"Businesses will come downtown based on the new labor pool that's being established," he said. "It really is a landmark project that will push activity through the Main Street barrier."
Suburban Dallas stands to benefit as well. Once Forest City decides to enter a market, it wholeheartedly embraces it. Besides the downtown initiatives, the developer is planning at least two major new retail projects in outlying areas.
"Dallas is giving Forest City a tremendous amount of money to make the downtown projects happen, but it's a two-way street," Gosnell said. "Dallas will get a huge return on its investment -- not just ad valorem real estate taxes, but real cash flow participation in the process. It's the best kind of public-private partnership.
"There also will be a huge ripple effect in the northeast section of downtown," he said. "Land and property values will increase. Other developers will want to come in and saddle up next to the Merc and be part of the project. It also will provide a vital link to the Farmer's Market from Main Street."
Gosnell, who just launched a new division for UCR called UCR Urban, is overseeing leasing of the retail components of Forest City's downtown projects. He also is heading up marketing of the retail space in One Arts Plaza, the new tower Billingsley Co. is developing that will house the headquarters of 7-Eleven Inc.
"It's terrific to see all of this activity downtown," he said. "For so many years, we've just stood by and wrung our hands about the problems we faced in the CBD. Now, things are finally happening."
cperez@bizjournals.com

Bye Bye Hank Haney range....Hello to two 20 story residential towers

2005-10-28T14:38:00.000-06:00

Plans for Cityplace towers take shape
20-story buildings at golf center site will have residential and retail space
12:00 AM CDT on Friday, October 28, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Developers have unveiled architectural plans for two residential towers in Dallas' Cityplace project.
Fairfield Residential LLC and Cityplace Co. will build a 20-story building at McKinney Avenue and Blackburn Street, across the street from the popular West Village complex.
WDG Habib Architecture designed the masonry, metal and glass tower, which will have retail space on the lower floors.
Next door, between Cityplace West Boulevard and Blackburn, Trammell Crow Residential and Cityplace Co. will build another 20-story condominium building with retail and office space. That tower is designed by Good, Fulton & Farrell Inc.
Plans for the buildings were unveiled Thursday night at a closing party for the Hank Haney Golf Center at Cityplace.
The popular Uptown driving range and practice facility is shutting down to make way for the developments. Cityplace Co. owns the land under the practice facility.
Its goodbye party also provided donations for a youth golf foundation.
"It's a thank-you for Hank Haney having been down there for 12 years," said Cityplace president Neal Sleeper.
Hank Haney has leased the 10-acre McKinney Avenue block from Cityplace Co. since 1993. Since then, the area has become one of Dallas' hottest real estate markets.
Work is scheduled to start on both residential towers in the next year.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

This seems a little harsh but you decide.....I thought for the money they paid and the hole they dug it would be different.

2005-10-27T09:13:00.000-06:00

Misplaced mall is shopping for a clue
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW: New center has a suburban feel in an urban hot spot
11:01 AM CDT on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News

And the prize for the most regressive shopping center of 2005 goes to Uptown Plaza. Unfortunately, it's not on a freeway out in Carrollton or McKinney, where its car-and-driver aesthetic would make more sense, but at Pearl and McKinney, the crossroads of Uptown, with the Crescent and the future Ritz Carlton on one side, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Arts District on the other.

And now, smack in the middle of the buzz sits a one-story, skin-deep Mediterranean hodgepodge, surrounded by hundreds of parking spaces, like a fragment of a mall that never got built. While the name hints at a certain urban sophistication – city, public space, street life – the reality is unadulterated suburbia, where the automobile rules and the pedestrian is an endangered species.
Uptown Plaza, built by the Shafer Property Co., occupies the site of the former Red Cross building, which the developer purchased in 2004 for approximately $65 a square foot. Ordinarily that price would demand at least a midrise building, something in the six-to-eight-story range. At one point, the developer talked about doing something that "played off the Crescent." But then he was able to sell a portion of the site to Hotel ZaZa for more luxury condos, freeing the remainder for, well, a suburban strip center.
"It's twice as tall as a typical suburban center," counters Steve Shafer, who's been developing these properties for 32 years. "It's got some scale to it."
As for the deep setbacks and 230 surface parking spaces, he says that "it's got to be functional, and not having parking in front spells failure for tenants. Architects tell me how horrible it is, but my definition of success is building something where tenants can make money over the long term. I can sleep at night with architects' bitching about my buildings but not if my tenants aren't doing business."
But it isn't just architects who are grumbling about Uptown Plaza. Developers and real-estate people are asking what it and similar projects mean for the long-term viability of the area.

"You've got to wonder if we are undercutting what we're trying to accomplish here with all these cheap materials and quickie designs," says Jack Gosnell of United Commercial Realty. "We need density and buildings that are going to last."
Uptown Plaza will open just as public debate about Dallas' new Comprehensive Plan reaches its peak. The plan, the city's first, emphasizes density, mixed use and public transit, all things that Uptown Plaza ignores.
"We need to actively discourage suburban-style development and provide incentives to create more urban density," says director of development services Theresa O'Donnell. Among those incentives might be lowering the parking requirements.
"We've already got 200 acres of surface parking lots downtown. It's a cheap way to hold land, but it doesn't serve the larger purpose of creating a robust downtown."
Ms. O'Donnell concedes, however, that without major zoning changes, the city can't do much about projects such as Uptown Plaza. Historically, the City Council has been reluctant to overhaul the zoning ordinance; perhaps a quick field trip to Uptown Plaza will change its members' minds.
E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com

Another block to be scraped in the Oak Lawn / Cedar Springs Area

2005-10-26T08:09:00.000-06:00

San Diego Developer Closes Land Play for City's Hottest Condo Market
Wednesday, October 26, 2005 By Connie Gore
(To read more on the multifamily market, click here.)
DALLAS-A private investor from San Diego has seized control of side-by-side multifamily properties in a land play for a foothold in the city's hottest condo corridor. The complexes, bought for full value of an outstanding $3-million note, will be scraped and the site rebuilt with condos.
"That's the highest and best use. He's buying them basically for the dirt," says Robert Aiello, partner in Wells Asset Management Inc., who teamed with Mike Wells to close the deal for the seller, a Kansas City conduit lender holding the note and poised to foreclose on a Denver-based partnership. The Versailles and Marrakesh Apartments, totaling 77 units, sit on 109,200 sf of prime infill land at 4625 Cedar Springs Rd., right beside the under-construction Westside Condos, an 83-unit, gated development.
Aiello says the Oak Lawn property was marketed strictly to condo developers. He says the winner used 1031 exchange funds from commercial sales in San Diego and teamed it to a $2-million loan with two-year, interest-only terms from Stillwater National Bank in Oklahoma. Wells Asset Management arranged the financing.
Aiello says the new owner is in the process of pulling together the design team to develop the site, which now holds two 37-year-old complexes that were 75% leased at sale time. Units are one- and two-bedrooms, averaging 863 sf and renting for 84 cents per sf.
The deal closed in a 30-day start to finish, with six offers going on the table. "Once we saw the location, knowing that market, we knew we'd be able to get the bank's full-market value," Aiello says. "I had some people chasing this thing, but this buyer stepped up quick."

Crow Holdings Buy Preston Forest Village from Dunhill Partners. Both are Uptown Companies.

2005-10-26T08:07:00.000-06:00

Crow Holdings Tucks Away Win for 171,028-SF Preston Forest VillageTuesday, October 25, 2005 By Connie Gore (For more retail coverage, click GlobeSt.com/RETAIL.)
DALLAS-Dunhill Partners Inc. has turned over the deed after a two-year hold to the class A Preston Forest Village, but held onto day-to-day functions for the 171,028-sf claim in North Dallas. Crow Holdings has scored the win with an offer that easily surpassed the $40-million-plus assessment.
The popular shopping block at 11661 Preston Rd. came to market without an ask. "It was widely marketed. We had tons of interest," Adam Howells, a Dallas director for Holliday Fenoglio Fowler LP, tells GlobeSt.com, "but the process was pre-empted by the buyer." The buyer of record is PFV Realty III LP of Dallas, but word is rapidly spreading on the street that Crow Holdings is the new owner.
Howells says the takeover was a mix of debt assumption and a requirement that Dunhill first buy the one developed pad site within the 10.5-acre development to make the deal whole. Once the Preston Village Animal Clinic went into the package, the long-time business associates completed the hand-off. "The intention is to defease the debt and put on new debt," says Howells, who brokered the sale along with HFF managing director Jim Batjer.
The 97%-leased center is anchored by a Whole Foods alongside names like Ulta Cosmetics, MiCocina Restaurant, Genghis Grill, Hollywood Video and Ritz Camera. According to Howells, the lease rollover is minimal for the near term.
The 20-year-old center sits on a 10.5-acre foothold at four corners of retail in one of the city's most prized pockets, Preston Hollow. The intersection, in all, holds more than 100 high-end shops. "It's just a tremendous class A asset in the heart of Dallas," Howells says. Howells says Dallas-based Dunhill didn't set out to retain leasing and management, but the deal was struck at the new owner's behest. Street-level retail space is quoted at $30 per sf, triple net, while second-floor shops are getting $18 per sf on a triple net basis.
Dunhill has boosted occupancy at least 5% in the past two years, according to Howells. "They felt like the market conditions were right to sell," he adds.

Good News for the Little Guy.

2005-10-25T15:07:00.000-06:00

Perry 'ceremonially' signs eminent domain legislationHolli L. Estridge
Staff Writer
Texas Gov. Rick Perry ceremonially signed into law Senate Bill 7, the state's eminent domain bill, Tuesday at the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association in Fort Worth.
The bill, approved during a special session in August, seeks to limit the power of government entities to take property for private development. Perry planned to ceremonially sign the bill earlier this year until the two hurricanes forced the state's attention on recovery efforts.
"The power of eminent domain is the power of government to dramatically change people's lives by taking their property," Perry said at the news conference. "This power must not be used lightly nor broadly, and only when property is vital to achieving a compelling public good. Eminent domain for public use is a necessary power. Eminent domain for private use is a great threat to Texans rights."
Legislators filed the bill in response to a controversial June U.S. Supreme Court decision. In the case, Kelo vs. the city of New London, Conn., a majority of justices ruled New London was justified in seizing homeowners' property in support of a development that would generate higher tax revenue for the government.
In North Texas, taxpayer-funded projects such as the Dallas' Trinity River improvements and the Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington have focused attention on the issue.
The bill restricts governmental and private entities from taking land for economic development uses, unless the economic development is a secondary result of the activity. It also keeps the same entities from exercising eminent domain powers to confer a private benefit on particular private parties.
The bill identifies transportation, flood control, public buildings, utility services, sports and community venues, waste disposal and other public infrastructure among the projects for which entities can exercise eminent domain.
It also establishes an interim, 10-member committee of legislators to study the use of eminent domain power, including use for economic development purposes and prepare a report for the 80th Legislature to discuss.
"There's no bigger supporter of economic development than I, but I draw the line when government begins to pick winners and losers among competing private interests -- and the loser is the Texan who owns the land to begin with," Perry said.
hestridge@bizjournals.com

Your Dog wants reservations and a half-caf soy beef latte.

2005-10-25T08:09:00.000-06:00

Enjoy a cup of coffee with Fido
Vet's new concept to include coffee shop, pet bar and storeCynthia D. Webb
Staff Writer
Veterinarian Chip Cannon is making a $1 million bet that pet owners want to enjoy a cup of joe in the company of their pets.
Cannon's three-in-one retail concept, scheduled to open in November, will include a coffeehouse, pet food bar with holistic food and a store with hard-to-find pet accessories.
Healthy and cool are the key concepts behind City Pet Supply, a 4,000-square-foot store opening this fall at Oak Lawn and Congress avenues next to Cannon's Oak Lawn veterinary clinic. Cannon is launching the store with Jay Young, a Dallas real estate investor. City Pet Supply will stock everything from natural foods to pet booties to muzzles that allow dogs to drink water, but not eat everything in sight, Cannon said. The free-standing store will also house Urban Dog Coffee for humans.
"The preparation areas will be fully enclosed in glass and separate from the animals," Cannon said. That means it will be the first indoor restaurant in Dallas where pets and owners can mingle. The shop will stock Illy, an Italian coffee, as well as its own branded coffee and snacks.
The space will also include The Whole Pet Cafe. Meals for animals made with human-grade meat, vegetables and grains will retail for between $4 to $10.
Finding a niche
In addition, Cannon plans to open Whole Pet, a holistic clinic with a retail component, and CityPetSupply.com, a Web site, in December. Cannon is the founder and majority stake holder of City Veterinary Centers with locations in Oak Lawn and Uptown.
The Whole Pet clinic will be in a 3,600-square-foot space at Preston Royal Shopping Center at Preston Road and Royal Lane in Dallas. The 1,100-square-foot clinic will offer treatment such as acupuncture, chiropractic and natural medicines. The rest of the space will house a second City Pet retail location. Cannon expects to hire 40 employees by the end of the concepts' first year.
Moving forward with the retail stores was an easy choice, Cannon and Young said. Since opening the Oak Lawn clinic in 1997, the practice -- which started with three employees -- now has 40. It has had between 25% and 40% annual growth while serving an urban clientele.
"We are serving a niche population in an urban area, and we are tying the retail and holistic brands into the City Vet brand," Young said.
Young said the pet service industry expects sales of $35 billion in 2005, but he admits the industry is not recession or high gas price-proof.
Cannon's established practices and approach to provide either a service, product or advice in a one-stop shop should attract new clients, according to an industry consultant.
"The veterinary profession has begun to understand the pet owners want more from their vets," said Tracy Dowdy, a certified veterinary practice manager and owner of Bedford-based Management Resource Group. Dowdy works with veterinarians to improve their practices. She has not worked with Cannon.
She said society has changed over the last 30 years and studies show 89% of owners see pets as a family member.
"Cannon is progressive in what he's offering his community. It takes a certain amount of risk, but there's a real possibility it will be successful," she said.
cwebb@bizjournals.com

2005-10-24T07:16:00.000-06:00

Kohn Pedersen Fox proposed a modern look for Dallas' new arena in 1998.

I couldn't agree more. I thought the Old look was a bad idea then and it is even worse now.

2005-10-24T06:57:00.000-06:00

AAC's red brick retro doesn't match sleek towers rising nearby
12:00 AM CDT on Friday, October 21, 2005
Many years ago when I was young and foolish, I painted diagonal stripes on my living room wall.
At the time I thought it was brilliant. Of course, it wasn't.
Stripes are just fine for zebras and race cars, but they don't do a lot for living rooms, let me tell you. Eventually I figured this out.
Sadly, it will take more than a bucket of white paint to fix American Airlines Center.
The Uptown sports arena is a beautiful building – the epitome of early 20th-century design.
And that's the problem. The sleek towers and apartment blocks going up around the arena aren't done nostalgia-style. Indeed, those buildings – as I've said before – may be some of the best of 21st-century architecture.
They make the red brick arena look even more out of date.
Originally, plans for the Victory project called for several buildings in similar retro style to join American Airlines Center. Over the years, those plans were scrapped, and the developers – wisely – quit looking back and moved ahead in architecture.
But that still leaves the massive arena with its period features as the centerpiece of the neighborhood.
Victory's developers would have been better off with the design proposed by architects Kohn Pedersen Fox. It was a streamlined, curving building of glass and metal with soaring light towers along both sides. There wasn't a red brick in sight.
Kohn Pedersen Fox has gone on to work on other buildings proposed for Victory, including a tower planned across the street from the arena.
Two ultra-modern retail and office buildings that will soon rise on the south side of American Airlines Center will partially block the view of the arena from the modern W Hotel across the street.
But no amount of construction will disguise what the arena has become – a building that's been left behind.

Union Tower redo

Developer Hamilton Properties is hoping for an early November start for its latest downtown building redo.
After its successful redevelopment of the Dallas Power & Light Building and the Davis Building, Hamilton Properties will convert the empty Union Tower Complex on Thanks-Giving Square into residential and retail space.
The two-building office complex has been mostly empty since 1992.
Hamilton Properties is close to completing its financing for the more than $100 million remodeling of the two office towers.

On to the next phase

A developer with other projects in Uptown has been tapped to build the next phase of the Cityplace community on McKinney Avenue.
Fairfield Properties has teamed up with Cityplace Co. to build a 256-unit residential and retail project at 3636 McKinney Ave. at Blackburn Street. The 20-story tower will be on the site of the Hank Haney Golf Center.
Fairfield has hired Sawyer Design Associates to work on plans for the Cityplace project and another residential building it has in the works at the nearby Quadrangle retail and office complex.
Fairfield is also building two residential projects in the Victory complex northwest of downtown.

Looks like Ray Hunt got his deal.

2005-10-19T15:22:00.000-06:00

Council paves way for Hunt
02:39 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 19, 2005
By DAVE LEVINTHAL / The Dallas Morning News

The Dallas City Council easily passed a multimillion-dollar tax abatement Wednesday that all but assures billionaire oilman Ray Hunt will build a corporate headquarters building in downtown Dallas.
Construction of the 15-story tower, to be built between Akard and St. Paul streets along Woodall Rodgers Freeway, will commence “within days,” said John Scovell, president and chief executive officer of the Woodbine Development Corp., a Hunt Consolidated subsidiary.
“This is it. It’s done. We’re ready to build,” Mr. Scovell said.
The Hunt headquarters will be among the first new office buildings constructed downtown in two decades.
But the 11-2-2 vote didn’t come before Mayor Laura Miller described the subsidy as a waste of taxpayer money – an assertion to which most of her council colleagues objected.
The tax abatement’s estimated value is $6.3 million.
Ms. Miller also sharply questioned several city staff members who helped construct the tax abatement deal, as well as Mr. Scovell, saying, “This process has not been good, and the transparency has been nonexistent.”
Council members say the mayor, who long has criticized Mr. Hunt as a greedy businessman looking for public money wherever he can get it, let her personal animosity toward him cloud her judgment.
“It seems like this was the opening of the Miller vs. Hunt trial,” council member Ron Natinsky said.
Ms. Miller disagrees and denies that personality played into her opinion of the deal.
Mr. Hunt’s headquarters now reside within 15 stories of the Fountain Place tower several blocks from the proposed construction site. Hunt’s lease on that property expires next year.
Ms. Miller and Councilman Mitchell Rasansky voted against the tax abatement. Councilman Gary Griffith was absent from the vote, while Councilwoman Linda Koop did not vote because of a declared conflict of interest.
The council is scheduled Wednesday afternoon to debate whether to continue negotiations with Hunt officials that would swap city-owned Reunion arena and its surrounding land for a parking lot near the Dallas Convention Center.
Dallas hopes to use the parking lot for sale or lease to development mogul Billy Bob Barnett, who has constructed facilities such as Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth, to build a proposed 100,000-square-foot entertainment facility.
E-mail dlevinthal@dallasnews.com

More from the experts...They say Dallas has a bright future.

2005-10-18T07:43:00.000-06:00

NYC 10 17 05
THE FUTURE THIS TIME
Dees Stribling

The Conference Board's first-ever commercial real estate conference, Managing Real Estate for Corporate Growth and Performance, addressed an array of current issues and trends in corporate real estate, but during the afternoon of the first day it turned its attention in particular to the future.The panel discussion "Human Assets: Planning for the Shrinking Workforce" took up the prospect of an anemic workforce in the US and other developed nations--which demographic experts say is closer than many occupants of corporate C-suites realize. But according to panel moderator Suzanne Heidelberger, director of real estate at the world's largest law firm, Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, that's changing. "Heavy hitters are now beginning to discuss this issue," she told a full room at the InterContinental Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. "What to do about the shrinking workforce is becoming a hot-button issue."Panelist Tamara J. Erickson, executive officer and director of management consultants the Concours Group, painted the bigger demographic picture for the audience. "The number of mid-career workers especially is shrinking," she said, as the Baby Boom ages. But since fewer young people are entering the workforce, that trend will extend quite far into the future, at least until 2050. The same is true?or even worse?for most European countries and Japan, all of which are aging."There's a high probability of labor shortages," agreed panelist Ronald J. Sarno, director of real estate at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. "We've noticed that it's already harder to get employees."What can employers do in the face of adverse demographics? "There are no universal best practices," noted Erickson, but companies need to adjust their thinking. One idea along these lines that seemed to strike a chord with the audience was a "career bell curve," which Erickson compared to careers in the academic world. In that career model, young people rise in responsibility into middle age, but work doesn't end abruptly with retirement. Instead, people still continue to contribute as seniors, though perhaps through part-time or job sharing configurations.In short, companies will need to be more receptive to the needs of older workers. But that's hardly the only consideration going forward. Acknowledging diversity will also be critical, said panelist Angela Vallot, president of Vallot Consulting and former chief diversity officer for Texaco and Colgate-Palmolive Co."People have a knee-jerk reaction to diversity, and think it's just about race and gender," she said. "But it's really about all the differences among employees, including things that can't be seen, such as the values each employee brings to the company.Vallot pointed out that attention to diversity in a tight labor market is more than just a matter of legal compliance or even a moral imperative. "Diversity is a competitive advantage," she asserted. "It's part of your image, your reputation, as you compete for talent. Diversity is directly linked to ROI and market shares."
The next panel, "Cities of Tomorrow" took a corporate real estate users' look at where the action's going to be in the coming decades. Where are companies going to be expanding? Which cities offer the best prospects for corporate growth, worldwide, in 2010 to 2020, asked moderator Jeff Johnson of Equity Office Properties Trust.Some choices weren't surprising. Panelist Dino Fusco, managing director of Goldman Sachs, offered Bangalore?or perhaps another Indian city?as a star real estate city of the near future. "We have about 300 employees there now, and will have 1100 by the end of the year, two years ahead of schedule," he noted. "I wouldn't have even guessed than only five years ago."More surprising was his enthusiasm for the former hub of Communism, Moscow. "We have 4,000 square feet there now," he said, "but are in the market for 40,000. It could be the London of that part of Europe," referring to the city as a financial center.Panelist Peter J. Miscovich, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Service Practice, suggested that much future real estate activity would be away from metro hubs, in secondary centers. "Dallas, Denver and Raleigh-Durham have great futures ahead," he said. "Internationally, there will be a similar shift, such as to cities in Eastern Europe. Helsinki is a great example."
Lee Utke, director of global real estate strategy and asset management for Whirlpool Corp., brought a manufacturer's perspective to the panel. "We don't want to be in major cities, but near a skilled workforce." As examples, he cited the company's recent $200 investment in manufacturing facilities in the university town of Monterrey, Mexico, and the fact that the company is in the smaller Shenzhen, China, rather than a major center such as Beijing or Shanghai. All of the panelists were at pains to point out that expansion overseas is no easy matter for any company. Caprice or opaque government policies are always a worry, for instance.Simple infrastructure issues might be as well. Fusco told a story about examining a new building in China, which was going well until the Goldman Sachs party got to the matter of fire doors. "It turned out that they opened into the stairway?opened so that they would be blocking people coming down the stairs. So you have to be careful. The infrastructure might not be what you can use."

One panel of experts vision of the future. Is it possible for 10 people to share a seat and have automated call centers......We will see.

2005-10-18T07:36:00.000-06:00

NYC 10 17 05
THE STATE OF SPACE
Dees Stribling

The Conference Board's first real estate conference kicked off in late September in front of a crowd at the InterContinental The Barclay hotel in Manhattan, with a full program devoted to corporate real estate. In a series of presentations and panel discussions, "Managing Real Estate for Corporate Growth and Performance" covered a variety of corporate real estate issues, from the nitty-gritty of workspace cost efficiencies?how few square feet per employee can be squeezed out of facililties?to the broader outlook in the office markets, and its impact on how companies use, acquire and dispose of their real estate assets.During one of the opening panels, "Corporate Real Estate ROI," the tension in corporations between cutting real estate costs and still providing a first-rate working environment for their employees was all too evident. At one point, moderator Donald E. Huffner, senior vice president of Equity Office Properties, who runs EOP's New York, Washington and Atlanta operations, said, "I've heard about 20% growth and no new space. I hear figures as low as 90 square feet per person. And yet I hear that the employee comes first. I don't understand that."Peter J. Miscovich, a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services Practice, admitted that more workers in a tighter space "is a tough balance," but in the interest of corporate efficiency, a necessary one. And one made easier in the future by wireless communications technology."Wireless allows people greater flexibility," Miscovich said, noting that "virtual free addresses" at his firm allow four people to share one seat in some cases?a figure he thought could eventually be 10 for one seat. "It's already true that the office is more for socialization and knowledge transfer than actual work. That's only going to accelerate in the future."Frank Cuevas, senior vice president of client relationship management at Citigroup, agreed that there's a tension between the needs of workers for workspace and the need to be as efficient as possible in real estate use. "If you improve a workspace, you won't get a return on capital, but there is a return" in less quantifiable areas, he said. "So that has to be taken into account in cost efficiency strategies."The panel also turned to the question of decentralization, which has been on the minds of corporate America at least since September 11, 2001, gaining new currency in the wake of this year's hurricanes. "Usually you hear of call centers and back offices and so forth being dispersed, but some core assets can be if you think it through," said panelist Harry Stein, director of corporate real estate for General Electric Corp. "But the main thing in any corporate real estate is to figure out how to add measurable value. It simplifies things a bit, but at GE, if you can't measure it, don't do it."Cuevas discussed Citigroup's well-known decentralization out of Manhattan. "There's been considerable movement out of New York City, into New Jersey and Queens, for instance," he noted. The company's primary motivation for the move was its occupancy at World Trade Center 7, he noted.According to Miscovich, there will be a change beyond simple dispersion of some corporate functions in the not-too-distance future. He even wondered, in the case of call centers (a well dispersed function already), whether there will even be many of them 10 years from now."Will the call center disappear?" he asked. "Fully automated call centers will be possible, for one thing. And the development of better broadband technologies will mean that virtual call centers will be more and more possible. The amount of real estate devoted to call centers might well shrink in the coming years."Dispersion and data centers were also a key component of "Sarbanes-Oxley: Guidance from the Inside." Panelist Ronald Bowman of Tishman Real Estate Services noted that remote data backup systems were mandated not only by a consortium of federal agencies following 9/11, but also by Sarbanes-Oxley.During the wide-ranging initial panel of the conference, "Real Estate and the Competitive Advantage," moderated by Robert Alexander, chairman of the tri-state region of CB Richard Ellis, the discussion quickly turned to the health of the office market. From the corporate users' point of view, the long buyer's market looks like it's winding down."It looks like the end of blend and extent," declared panelist Raymond G. Torto, principal and chief strategist at Torto Wheaton Research, while characterizing the outlook for corporate real estate. "The office market will start recovering next year?actually it's started already in New York, Los Angeles, DC and some other markets. The economy is finally expanding, and there hasn't been much in the way of new construction."There has, famously, been a lot in the way of investment sales in recent years, especially among office buildings, and especially by a corporate America eager to do dispositions in a sellers market, or some form of sale-leaseback. According to Bob White, president of Real Capital Analytics, the selloff isn't over yet--$175 billion of office and industrial properties traded last year, and it will probably be more than $200 billion this year, he said. "Deals are more creative than ever, there's still a pent up demand for single-tenant properties, and sale-leasebacks and vacant properties are both appreciating," said White.Does it add up to a bubble? No, was the consensus, just a good time to be a seller: "Prices are high and rents are low, at this moment," noted Torto. "It's a good time for corporations to reduce the ownership portion of their portfolio.That brought up the larger question of what real estate ought to mean to a corporation. "How does real estate fit into a firm?" asked the panel's Mark Marcucci, managing direction of Lehman Brothers. "It's physical, but symbolic too, and the seat for IT structures, and so growth. But it's tough to stay in synch with the business cycle, and to predict growth."He went on to describe an acquisition in the Midwest that Lehman had made, consolidating seven locations in B and C space into one A space. "That new space made a difference," he recalled. "In the former space, the company had a lack of technology, low morale and low volume," Marcucci said. "Now volume's terrific. The real estate provided a platform for that, technology included. Real estate can help align a business."

Real estate news this week. Younan sells his crap....Peloton get a nice assignment.....A very cool piece of property for sale on I 20.

2005-10-15T07:40:00.000-06:00

3 office buildings
on Stemmons sold
A California investor has sold three Stemmons Freeway corridor office buildings for $27.5 million.
Younan Properties said Thursday that it sold the Brookriver Executive Center, One Brookriver Place and Mockingbird Tower buildings to Khoshbin Properties of Irvine, Calif., and Professors Capital of Solano Beach, Calif. Together the buildings contain about 600,000 square feet. Scot Farber and Darrell Betts of Grubb & Ellis Co. handled the sale.
Younan Properties recently paid almost $90 million to buy three buildings in North Dallas along North Central Expressway.

Leasing firm hired
for One Arts Plaza
With construction under way on its One Arts Plaza building, developer Billingsley Co. has hired a team of leasing agents with a track record in the downtown market.
Peloton Real Estate Partners will work with Billingsley Co. to find tenants for 200,000 square feet of office space in the building not already set aside for 7-Eleven's corporate headquarters. "Our experience in downtown and Uptown made it a natural fit," said Peloton principal Joel Pustmueller.
The building at Flora and Routh streets will open in March 2007 and also includes a 37,000-square-foot retail plaza, 71 residential condominiums and a seven-level parking garage.

Mountain Creek
development for sale
One of the largest undeveloped tracts in southwest Dallas County is up for sale.
The 1,182-acre Mountain Creek development on Interstate 20 was originally planned in the 1980s for a massive mixed-use development. But the project went into foreclosure and was bought by investors 10 years ago.
Now, owners PNL Cos. and Blackacre Capital Management have hired Cushman & Wakefield of Texas to market the property.

Good news for a growing Uptown company - D. Anderson & Co.

2005-10-15T07:30:00.000-06:00

LATEST NEWS -->
Monday, October 17, 2005

New game plan
This entrepreneur switched her business plan in midstream, from one that links research sites to one that links patients to clinical trial programs

Jennifer Gordon
Staff Writer

It has taken Diana Anderson a number of years to find her niche.
For a decade, Anderson led Rheumatology Research International, which was an organization that provided a network that rheumatology researchers could tap into for help managing and running research and clinical trials. Then, in 2002 she decided to launch D. Anderson & Co. That decision enabled Anderson to change strategies and tap into what she saw as a great business opportunity to recruit patients to participate in clinical trials beyond rheumatology.
Anderson, a nurse by training, originally tapped into the clinical trial market because of a personal tie. Her husband has rheumatoid arthritis, and that led to her work as director of the St. Paul Arthritis Center, where she was charged with developing an arthritis program.
Shifting business models is not uncommon for entrepreneurs, but business owners should be careful not to change things up too much, said Joseph Picken, senior lecturer at the University of Texas-Dallas School of Management. "The thing to avoid is what we call chasing rabbits (chasing after one new idea, then another)."
Testing an idea by selling it to customers is an easy way to determine if the new idea is valid, he said. "There's only one way to prove that you have a good idea and that's if someone is willing to pay you enough money to deliver that service or provide that product."
Fast and furious
And for Anderson, that question was answered within the first month as D. Anderson & Co. booked $1 million in new business working with researchers to recruit clinical trial patients mainly from repeat customers from RRI.
"The writing was on the wall within maybe two months; the patient recruiting business was far overshadowing the parent company as far as revenue was concerned," Anderson said.
During the first four months of this year, D. Anderson & Co. exceeded its total 2004 revenue of $5 million. Anderson said she expects to finish 2005 with $7 million in revenue. The company also added 2,500 square feet to its Uptown Dallas headquarters to accommodate its growing staff of 30 people.
Though things are going well now, Anderson said if she had a regret it would be not trusting her instincts and shifting businesses earlier.
"Perhaps if we'd done that a couple years earlier we'd be further into this," Anderson said. "We had a hard time letting go of that model even though we could see in the business that our profit margins and our business was escalating."
It took about a year to completely shift businesses. Initially Anderson and other company executives tried to shift all employees to the new model, she said. "Honestly we probably should have said this is a totally different business."
jgordon@bizjournals.com

This has nothing to do with Uptown but I like it when Companies do the right thing......Now about that 60 mpg car.....

2005-10-15T07:28:00.000-06:00

'Green' Toyota Dealership to Be Built in McKinney; -First Auto Dealership in Nation to Seek Green Certification-

DALLAS, Oct. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Pat Lobb Toyota of McKinney, which brokeground Oct. 14 at S. Central Expressway and El Dorado Parkway, is going to be"green." It is being designed from the ground up to maximize allenvironmentally sensitive possibilities. The exterior and interior featureswill conserve energy and water and will incorporate approximately 75 percentrecycled materials such as aluminum, steel, tile, carpet and more. The dealership, designed by the Dallas office of Gensler and constructedby Turner Construction's Dallas Business Unit, will have 53,000 square feetand will sit on 14 acres. It is set to be completed in June 2006. "There are some things you do just because it's the right thing to do.This is one of those," said Pat Lobb, dealer principal. "Also, it is a greatlocation in a great city, and we are looking forward to serving the McKinneyarea." Pat Lobb Toyota is registered with the U.S. Green Building Council, and itwill be the first auto dealership in the nation to seek official LEED(Leadership of Energy and Environmental Design) certification. LEED is asystem for rating buildings that are designed to be sensitive to theenvironment. It was designed by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofitorganization headquartered in Washington D.C. To receive the LEEDcertification, green buildings are evaluated in six categories: sustainablesites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources,indoor environmental quality, and innovation and design process. Many of the newer Toyota dealerships have varying degrees of environmentalfeatures, but Pat Lobb Toyota is the first all-environmental dealership to bedesigned with the LEED standards in mind. Toyota buildings such as the SouthCampus of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, in Torrance, Calif., and the processingcenter in Portland, Ore., meet the LEED standards, but this is the firstdealership. McKinney has become a prime location for construction of green buildingsand is living up to its slogan, "Unique by Nature." Pat Lobb Toyota will jointhe green office building owned by West World Holding Company, a green Wal-Mart and the Roy Lee Walker Elementary School -- all in McKinney -- in theleading edge for green development. "One of the reasons people choose to work and do business in McKinney isbecause our rolling hills, trees and creeks," said McKinney Mayor BillWhitfield. "Stewardship of our unique environment is important to the peopleof McKinney and we're happy to welcome a company like Pat Lobb Toyota thatshares our values." Taking a step further in caring about nature, Pat Lobb is personallydonating five historically significant Texas trees to The Heard NaturalScience Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary. The five trees are: a descendent ofthe Texas Treaty Live Oak Tree (where Stephen F. Austin made an agreement withthe native Texas Indians), a Dwight D. Eisenhower Green Ash (from Denison,Texas, where Ike grew up), an Alamo Red Oak (from the Alamo), a Jim Bowie LiveOak and a Texas Champion Burr Oak. The purpose of Lobb's tree donation is toset aside a place for the historic trees that are significant to the growth ofTexas. The museum will subsequently add to these trees. Pat Lobb Toyota will be serviced by Gulf States Toyota, the independentdistributor serving 145 dealers in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana andMississippi.

Steve Brown:City Hall, can you spare incentives?

2005-10-14T09:18:00.000-06:00

Steve Brown:City Hall, can you spare incentives?
Expect developers to tap Dallas for funding on downtown projects
07:36 PM CDT on Thursday, October 13, 2005

The money window is open at City Hall.
At least that's what real estate developers are hoping.
Earlier this year when the city of Dallas gave tax incentives for 7-Eleven's new headquarters in the Arts District, the mayor and council members gathered for a news conference were grinning and backslapping.
But now that other developers want their slice of public incentives to build in downtown, the City Hall gang may not be so jolly.
It could wind up looking like the bank run scene in It's a Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart is trying to talk folks out of asking for too much cash. Ol' Jimmy wouldn't have a chance with a room full of eager real estate developers.
Next week, Dallas energy firm Hunt Consolidated is expected to ask the city for more than $6 million in incentives to build an office tower downtown.
That's less than the $9 million in public benefits offered to 7-Eleven's developer Billingsley Co., which has broken ground on its $100 million plus project in the Arts District.
Wanting their due
"We are very optimistic concerning the City Council approving the proposed incentive package," John Scovell, president of Woodbine Development, a Hunt partnership, said in a news release.
It looks like most of the City Council is eager to give Hunt Consolidated its requested tax break. But the mayor says they are in too big a hurry to "give away tax money."
Don't think that Hunt and Billingsley are the only companies that will ask for dough from Dallas' leaders.
Other developers are already putting their pencils to projects downtown that will require a dose of Dallas tax dollars to get going.
Their argument seems only fair – if 7-Eleven or Hunt Consolidated get money, why can't they have some, too?
'Not a dirty word'
Developer Craig Hall hopes to build a 47-story commercial and condo tower in the Arts District. And yes, he'll probably need tax breaks to get the deal done.
"Our deal is likely to falter, absent incentives," Mr. Hall said. "I strongly feel that the city should be doing tax abatements in a transparent way and have a program."
That's the way the city has handled redevelopment of many old downtown office buildings into trendy loft apartments. The city just did a handshake deal with Cleveland developers, who are getting more than $60 million in public-sector incentives to redo the vacant Mercantile National Bank complex.
Suburbs such as Frisco and Allen regularly use public economic development funds to pay companies and developers driving new projects.
Mr. Hall has landed several tenants for his Hall Office Park in Frisco, thanks to those incentives. So he's a fan of the idea.
"The city of Dallas has to realize that incentives are not a dirty word," he said. "They are a reality of cities competing today.
"They result in a bigger tax base and more investment."
But where do you draw the line? And what about across the freeway, in Uptown?
Developers at Victory who are putting up hundreds of residential units, hotel rooms and retail space may want tax breaks, too.
"Each project is different, and the fact that others are requiring incentives doesn't mean we will," said Jonas Woods, Hillwood Capital president. "However, that being said, we are looking at new Victory Park projects that would absolutely require some public assistance."
Robbing Peter
If you are an owner of an older building that may lose tenants to new towers made possible by city giveaways, you probably are not so keen on the idea.
"It is extremely disappointing to see the city offering incentives for new speculative projects when existing buildings have paid taxes so long without any," said John Zogg of Crescent Real Estate Equities, downtown Dallas' biggest office landlord. "There is no demand for new office buildings downtown. They are going to rob Peter to pay Paul."
Maybe so, but Mr. Hall is correct – tax incentives are here to stay.
And he's also right that the folks at City Hall better have a plan. The line at the money window is going to get longer.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

you can stroll over to the Urban Market and order up a barbecue pulled-pork quesadilla washed down with a mocha frappe. That's progress.

2005-10-13T07:12:00.000-06:00

More in store?
Grocer flavors downtown mix with one more ingredient
06:50 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 12, 2005
By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News
Thriving downtowns have certain things in common, such as housing close to jobs, a resident population with money to spend and amenities that include parks, museums, strolling streets, affordable transit and, ah yes, grocery stores. Being able to buy something other than Cheetos and a Diet Coke at a minimart is one definition of urbanity.
Having survived for decades on this meager fare, downtown Dallas residents now have a full-blown grocery store called Urban Market, located in the former Interurban Building on Jackson Street.
Also Online
Read a review of Urban Market Cafe
Opened in July, it is smaller and more pragmatic than Central Market or Whole Foods, selling detergent and cat litter along with tofu and extra-virgin olive oil. Yet many of the standard ingredients are there: cafe, deli, wine store, flower shop. There are cushy chairs for reading, free wireless access, even a quesadilla bar.
True to its name, Urban Market features raw concrete floors and columns, exposed ducts and pipes in the ceiling, and large plate-glass windows looking out on a passing parade that hasn't quite formed. Clearly, you aren't in Plano. The upper floors contain 134 apartments with an attached parking garage, creating that synthesis of eating, sleeping and mobility that urbanists are always touting.
"Our intention is to create a real neighborhood gathering place," says developer Chip Johnson, emphasizing the last two words. He wants the market to be a destination and a diversion, as well as a place to pick up pasta and a cheap red for a late-night dinner. The cafe is doing a brisk breakfast and lunch business during the week, he says, and its bar is picking up, "though we haven't tapped the happy-hour crowd yet." The market has hosted a few parties and business meetings and is on the hunt for more.
It's far too early to say whether all this effort will turn into profit and permanence. Downtown Dallas is still terra incognita for merchants, and all predictions of a renaissance should appear in quotation marks.
According to the Central Dallas Association, 3,000 people live inside the freeway loop, and roughly 30,000 within a one-mile radius, most of them in Uptown, which is becoming its own chic world. In diagnosing the health of downtowns, planners often refer to the 4 percent rule, which says that when 4 percent of a city's population resides downtown it has a fighting chance. In Dallas, that would mean 40,000 residents within the freeway loop, which at this point is stargazing.
"We're looking for 10,000 residents inside the loop in five years," says the association's Kourtny Garrett. "We believe that's a realistic number."
More residents will mean more shops, restaurants and grocery stores, but they won't guarantee success. Other things are needed. Downtown is desperate for parks and recreation space, those essential grace notes of urban life. It also needs quick and affordable cross-town transit to connect its scattered attractions and a couple of superior grade schools that could bring the middle class back downtown faster than you can say sushi.
The folks at Urban Market, and Dallas City Hall, are looking to the massive renovation of the Mercantile block and adjacent buildings to resuscitate the moribund east end of downtown and generate the kind of street and commercial life that has been only a rumor for decades. It may happen, though the Mercantile is a complex project with many uncertainties.
In the meantime, you can stroll over to the Urban Market and order up a barbecue pulled-pork quesadilla washed down with a mocha frappe. That's progress.

Good Article about how part of Uptown used to be Little Mexico.

2005-10-12T07:15:00.000-06:00

Vestiges of Little Mexico
In the shadow of Uptown, one block recalls a once-thriving, tight-knit neighborhood

11:24 AM CDT on Sunday, October 9, 2005

By LAUREN SMILEY / The Dallas Morning News
If you saw Alec Adamez walking down an Uptown sidewalk, you'd probably think he's lost.
Just blocks to the doors of Stanley Korshak, Alec walks out of a neighborhood watering hole in a New Orleans cap and a Jamaica T-shirt, sweaty from home repairs, bare feet plunged into brown loafers. But as the door shuts on the bar where he's watched Cowboys games for years, he exits his bubble of familiarity and enters 2005. He paces down McKinnon, the entrance to the Dallas North Tollway lined by apartments with names such as the Gables and Turtle Creek Villas. Strobe lights from the Victory water tower race across the sky. Alec starts complaining in a way that only a 67-year-old former Marine who remembers when this road was dirt can.
"My, oh my! It just boggles my mind what they're doing. This used to be nothing but little ransacked houses, and look at it now. Where's all these people coming from?"
He curses at the six lanes of cars backed up at the stoplight at 11 on a Saturday night. "It used to be dead right now," he says.
"Used to" meaning when this was Little Mexico. Before he moved to North Dallas in 1961. Before a yuppie settlement called Uptown landed 30 years later.
Alec continues on to the front gate of his ramshackle wooden-frame house he only visits now to mow the lawn and pick up bills. He lets family members live there.
Across the street from the house, on a fence lining an excavation site, a future neighbor beckons in brilliant blue: the Azure. When the 31 floors are finished in two years, the tower will be the tallest residential high-rise in Uptown.
Alec's house sits on the corner of McKinnon and Wolf. He and his neighbors are at the junction of the neighborhood's working-class past, its gentrified present, its ever-taller and richer future.
On his block, some remember Little Mexico as a thriving, tight-knit neighborhood, where the scent of beans and tortillas wafted out of the houses and some people didn't lock their doors. Others remember its years of decline.
None has illusions about its future. On their block, there are 14 properties. Colliers International is selling six.
Alec says it's probably not a question of if he will join them, but when.
The value of the lot that holds his weather-worn home and back yard cluttered with weightlifting equipment, a punching bag and a "Beware of Dog" sign, rivals the value of some lots on manicured Swiss Avenue that are several times larger.
The Nañez residence down the street, well, "One day they were here, the next day they were gone – boom," he says. Up went signs for Luminaire town homes in its place.
"How can you stop this?" Alec muses, surveying the construction. "You can't stop this. You can only get out of the way."
Rosy memories
Across Wolf from Alec sits Ramon Rodriguez's white-clapboard house, plunked in the middle of Frost Bank's drive-through like Dorothy's house in Oz. The 97-year-old owner was the neighborhood legend, refusing to sell when the bank wanted in, and was even featured on HGTV's Homestead Holdouts for his gumption.
But he died in 2004. Few have his sort of resolve anymore.
Alec names his price: "All I'm asking for is six figures and Salma Hayek's phone number."
John Cantu, around the block on North Harwood, jokes that when Walker, Texas Ranger filmed a shootout in his house last spring, "I wanted them to blow it up."
Jesse Salinas, the 77-year-old on the corner with a Rottweiler named Spike, says, "I'll help 'em tear it down if they pay me." He wants to move to Lake Tawakoni and fish for crappie.
So if anyone echoes Mr. Rodriguez's commitment, "it would probably be me," says Art Moreno, who lives five houses down from Alec.
Art's parents bought the McKinnon house with all their savings in the 1940s in the heart of the city's Mexican and Mexican-American community, the area which, at its boom, was the estimated home of 15,000. Art describes himself as a "sentimental-fool kind of guy." He grew up in the 1950s, when kids played kick-the-can in the street. When people walked to the grocery store and work, not as part of the Uptown "walk to life" credo, but because some didn't have cars. When the trolley was transit to get downtown, not a "yuppie, tourist thing," with its stops at Hotel ZaZa and Hard Rock Cafe.
But then change caught up with Little Mexico. In 1963, the family moved to the M Streets when they heard their house would be razed to make way for the tollway.
The house ended up being spared, but the road sliced 13 feet off the front yard and destroyed the houses across the street. The barrio was carved in half, and many families moved out, leaving boarded-up residences behind.
Little by little, the barrio Art remembers fell away. The Dallas Tortilla Factory on North Harwood where, as a teenager, Art stood on a stepladder to feed masa into the vat was replaced by a glass office building. His childhood church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, was torn down, and the congregation relocated downtown.
After he inherited the house in 1975, he let the wooden floors sag, the paint chip. But in 2002, celebrating his 50th birthday, he decided to renovate his parents' old place.
"It's to honor their sacrifice," he says. "When I reach the end of my rope, I'm gonna look back and think what did I do, and maybe this is one of those things I can say I've done."
He replaced the siding, the windows, the doors. He had the foundation and wiring redone. He even started a Web site – 3019mckinnon.com – to show the transformation.
He figures his work is invisible to the cars zooming by at 50 mph. When a refrigerator repairman came this summer, he said he goes down the street at least twice a week and had never noticed any houses. Art knows most developers wish that there weren't any houses there at all. He says he's been approached to sell a dozen times.
"I guess what really gets my goat is that to many developers, this is just another parcel of land. No one knows what this neighborhood was about."
Art flirted with the idea of applying for a historical designation, but knows he wouldn't have much support. So now, he organizes block meetings about keeping up the property "to hold off the wolves" and holding out for a fair price, dreading the day that price will be offered and his house will come down: "It would be heartbreaking."
Not always so great
Around the corner from Alec's house, within earshot of the construction equipment at the Azure site, John Cantu doesn't understand what all the sentimental heehaw is about. The barrio was a rough place, he says, and this is the best he's ever seen it.
Growing up in the '60s, John says he ran to and from Travis Elementary each day to avoid neighborhood gangs. They'd steal his lunch money. Sometimes, he arrived home with a bloody lip or bloody nose.
"It was tough for me without brothers. I got to be a fast runner."
He names four boys on the block who were killed. When he heard gunshots down at the now-defunct corner bar in the early '90s, he decided to raise his daughter, Stephanie, in North Dallas.
But once Uptown took hold in 1999, he moved back to what had become a comparatively cheap foothold in one of the hottest neighborhoods in town. They can't afford much in the stores around – "We window shop" – but they can walk to Mavericks games in 10 minutes.
The crime on the block now is mostly petty: a few bikes stolen here, a squatter urinating in Art's yard there.
Stephanie remembers playing basketball out back with a homeless guy named Jeff, who slept on the porch of the vacant home next door.
"She doesn't understand the 'hood," he says. "She has no idea."
Still, his memories don't make him immune to sentimentality about the prospect of leaving.
"It would be an empty feeling because it was once a thriving community, and now it's shriveled to nothing. It used to be full of life. But that's progress."
The new neighbors
Six houses down from Alec's, Jesse Salinas, the man with the Rottweiler, watches from his front porch as the parade of prosperity drives into the Turtle Creek Villas.
"That's a Porsche, ain't it?"
"There goes one of the boats – there's three of 'em over on the other side."
He has to vacuum his house every other day, to clean up the dust flying in from the nearby construction sites.
"They're kind of squeezing us in," he says.
He's lived in this house for most of his 77 years, but he's not sentimental.
He hopes a buyout comes "mighty quick. I'm tired of paying the high property taxes."
Jesse remembers the day he drove down Fairmont and saw a sign that said "Uptown."
"I said, 'Where in the world is Uptown at?' "
But for now, he still calls it Little Mexico, and he doesn't plan on changing. "I know what it is," he says.
The difference is clear to Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, Swiss-born CEO of Harwood International, the company that owns 15 blocks of Uptown and is the developer of the Azure. Before, "this area was just sitting there," he says.
When he first drove through the area in 1979, it was not a quaint residential neighborhood, he says, but a blighted one.
"I guess because I wasn't from here, I saw it not for what it was – somewhat rundown, kind of scary – but for what it could be."
Now, he envisions the best live-work environment in the Southwest. He says eyesores – places with trash, scruffy unfinished lots, or boarded-up houses – need to go.
"I'm talking about things that are visually unappealing. That's how you can continue to improve an area for everyone's benefit."
Although he says he has no plans for developing Alec's block, he knows someone eventually will develop all areas that don't fit the Uptown look.
"It could change overnight. It could change over 15 years. It will change."
Arturo Rodriguez works at that change's epicenter.
After moving to West Dallas in the 1970s from Northern Mexico, Arturo used to come to Little Mexico to meet his friends, and then trek to the former Cuquita's location on Harry Hines for menudo.
Now at 51, he's back – in a hardhat and neon-green vest, excavating the pit for the Azure. On a hot Saturday in August, he points out the origin of the men operating the land movers: Coahuila. Nuevo León.
The work of transforming this patch of a former haven for Mexican immigrants is being carried out by a new generation of them.
The prices on the fence that lines the pit – 1-bedroom condos starting at $400,000 – remind Arturo of reality: The only time he'll get onto the property of the Azure is by digging the hole for it.
"Too many rich people are coming here. If I had that kind of money I would live in here."
The houses on the Azure footprint were razed years ago. Only a grassy area that served as a dog run for surrounding apartments remained before the digging began.
Mr. Rodriguez figures the rest of Little Mexico is on its last legs.
"I feel bad when they're tearing down something where the Mexican people live, but there's nothing I can do."
Progress calls. So he motions a grumbling 18-wheeler down the pit's ramp and goes back to work.
E-mail sundaylife@dallasnews.com
LITTLE MEXICO:
A HISTORY
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans first flocked to the blocks of wood-frame houses north of downtown in the early 20th century as they arrived for jobs with the railroads and to escape the Mexican Revolution. The area was formerly a Jewish community, whose residents migrated to South Dallas.
As newer immigrants arrived and established families started mom-and-pop groceries, bakeries and businesses, Little Mexico became the most populous Hispanic area in the city.
The area was part of a city and federal urban renewal project in the 1950s, which returned 390 substandard houses to code.
But as subsequent generations moved away, and freeways divided the neighborhood, the population dwindled. Many families left behind boarded-up houses, until Uptown development arrived in the 1980s and gained steam in the 1990s.
Statistically speaking, the transformation is one of the city's most dramatic economic successes. The resident poverty level of the area that included Little Mexico dove from 42 percent in 1990, to 11 in 2000, according to the census.
But the people changed, too. An area that was mostly Hispanic mid-century tapered off to 25 percent in 1990 and to just 10 percent in 2000.

Hunt plans for HQ is coming into focus.

2005-10-11T15:20:00.000-06:00

LATEST NEWS
Dallas Business Journal - 1:59 PM CDT Tuesday
Hunt pursues new HQ support, land swap dealJaime S. Jordan and Christine Perez
Staff Writers
The Dallas City Council is poised to be briefed and vote on a land swap deal with Hunt Consolidated that would eventually result in the Reunion Arena being torn down, a city official told the Dallas Business Journal Tuesday.
Hunt also is in negotiations with the city of Dallas to build a new $120 million corporate headquarters at 1900 N. Akard St. The 340,000-square-foot office tower would include a parking garage. It would house 500 employees and contain special facilities for Hunt Oil Co.'s geological and geophysical departments.
Hunt is seeking a 10-year, 73 percent tax abatement from the city to support the headquarters project, a package valued at about $6.3 million. The city would receive about $1 million annually in property taxes on the building after the 10-year tax abatement.
Land owned by Hunt in Irving near Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is being pitched as an alternative headquarters location. The site is larger and offers opportunities for future expansion. Irving has already offered economic incentives to Hunt; financial details of the package were not available.
Hunt Oil currently occupies about 300,000 square feet in Fountain Place at 500 N. Akard St., where it is the building's largest tenant. Its lease at Fountain Place expires in 2007.
With regard to the land swap, Dallas city council member Ed Oakley said the city of Dallas has been in discussions with Billy Bob Barnett, the developer of Billy Bob's Texas in Fort Worth, for more than a year about developing an entertainment district, complete with equestrian activities, a rodeo and horse racing that would be connected to the Dallas Convention Center.
Throughout the process, it was thought the city owned all of parking lot E adjacent to the convention center, but it turns out a portion of the lot is owned by Hunt. Under the proposed land swap, Hunt would give the city its share of the parking lot and in return Hunt would receive rights to the Reunion Arena, provided the company leases the arena back to the city for $1 a year so that the city can fulfill about three years of obligations.
After that time, Hunt could tear the building down giving the company a 26- to 27-acre tract of developable land.
Oakley wasn't sure how the idea would go over with the Council, which will be hearing its first briefing on the concept. However, he said the idea of tying the city's downtown convention center directly to the Trinity is a popular idea.
"It's one of our downtown priorities," he said. "Let's separate the personalities. If this weren't Ray Hunt, if this were anybody else the emotions wouldn't be there."
Calls to Hunt Consolidated were not immediately returned.
jsjordan@bizjournals.com and cperez@bizjournals.com

2005-10-07T16:20:00.000-06:00

Intellicenter Building

Dallas Developer hopes they see the future of Office Space. It sounds cool.

2005-10-07T16:04:00.000-06:00

JV Kicks Off $200M-Plus Spec Office Development in 10 US Markets
Friday, October 7, 2005 By Connie Gore DALLAS-

Koll Development Co. and Prudential Real Estate Services have broken ground on the first of 10 "green" buildings for a $200-million-plus plan to provide at least 1.5 million sf of specialty office space for corporate America by the end of 2006. Within two months, projects get underway near Dallas and Houston.
Three proposals already are in prospective tenants' hands for part of the Atlanta building, which is rising in Gwinnett County, and inquiries have been fielded for the planned addition to Westway Park in Houston, says Jake Ragusa, KDC's senior vice president, who led the charge to develop the Intellicenter pilot program. The North Texas building, like many of the others, will rise as pure spec when crews dig into the Regent Center tract in Irving.
Ragusa has spent the past year getting input from Fortune 500 companies and leading tenant reps nationwide to come up with a three-story building design, with 14-inch raised floors for cabling and HVAC, to meet LEED certification and corporate America's expectations for office set-ups exceeding 25,000 sf. Buildings range from 150,000 sf to 200,000 sf; each will cost $20 million to $25 million. The prototype has a 5:1,000 sf ratio for office space as well as parking--in sync to corporations' needs to put more employees into less space to shave real estate costs without hampering production and morale. Among the design perks is a separate thermostat for each work station.
After the first 10 are built, KDC and its Newark, NJ-based equity partner will "revisit" the design and market conditions to discuss expanding the program, Steve Van Amburgh, CEO for the Dallas-based KDC, tells GlobeSt.com. But, the prototypical design and preliminary interest have generated enough confidence that second sites in nearly all 10 markets have been ID'd or locked in for a second wave of construction, he says. "We really believe the popularity of these buildings is going to be contagious," he adds.
The 2006 construction schedule calls for starts in the following order: Charlotte, NC, Riverside, CA, Phoenix, Tampa, Austin, Raleigh-Durham, NC and Northern California. And, all will be completed before next year wraps up.
The Intellicenter-branded buildings were designed by San Francisco-headquartered Gensler and the St. Louis-based Forum Studio Inc. The Intellicenter general contracting award went to Clayco, also from St. Louis, which is KDC's contractor for Fluor Corp.'s headquarters project in Irving.
As for Intellicenter leasing, Van Amburgh says that decision will be made within two weeks. Interviews are in the final rounds. And, he says, it's a relatively safe bet that one national brokerage house is going to make a slam dunk for the entire coast-to-coast contract.

Bice, Nobu, N9NE its all good in the hood

2005-10-04T07:43:00.000-06:00

Big-name restaurants take Dallas seriously

Sandra Zaragoza
Staff Writer

In Dallas and beyond, developers have recognized the significance of having high-caliber restaurants. At the same time, more big-name restaurants and restaurateurs have started to give Dallas a serious look.
"Restaurants have come a long way from just a place for the public to dine to becoming marquee players in the development," said Dennis Leibovitz, executive vice president of Dallas-based The Retail Connection, "They are the attraction that often times bring people to the location."
In Uptown, Fort Worth-based Crescent Realty Equities Co. (NYSE: CEI) is preparing to welcome its newest attraction, Bice Ristorante by New York-based Bice (pronunced Bee-che) Group, into The Crescent. Jack Gosnell of Dallas-based United Commercial Realty and Tony Click of Crescent brokered the deal. Gumbo's and Oui Oui -- a well-noted flop-- formerly occupied the space.
The restaurant will open in mid-November, according to the Crescent.
Developers like Crescent Realty are leveraging the cachet a high-caliber restaurant brings to attract other retailers and restaurants, Leibovitz said. Having the famed New York-based restaurant, Nobu, nestled at the Hotel Crescent Court was a likely draw for Bice, he said.
Bice Group has 24 restaurants worldwide, and includes concepts Bice Ristorante, Bice Grand Cafe and Kan-Tin World Cuisine. The company has plans to open 15 Bice restaurants in 2006.
There were a number of restaurants interested in the Crescent site, which has great visibility in Uptown, said Brad Belletto of Vision 360, a hospitality design and consulting firm.
The Bice restaurant will be nearby another New York Italian concept with impressive stature, Il Mulino.
Bice and Il Mulino may go head to head in terms of cuisine, but Bice restaurant's expansive 6,590-square-foot space should be a departure from Il Mulino's intimate dining room, Belletto said.
Nearby the Crescent, Hillwood's Victory Park has amassed a collection that boasts famed New York chef Tom Colicchio's steak restaurant, Craft, and N9NE Steakhouse, as well as a clutch of local notables including Luna de Noche Gourmet Grill and Victory Tavern.
"(The restaurants) have set a tone for the district," said Elise Mikus, vice president of leasing for Hillwood. "We felt rather than having a single rock star, we would have a personality, a collection."
Dallas' collection of trophy restaurants likely will continue to expand as outside restaurateurs recognize the potential for high-volume business, experts say.
"Dallas has always been recognized as a major restaurant market. Now, it's picking up steam as far as national and international restaurants," Belletto said.
szaragoza@bizjournals.com

Holt picks up Quadrangle management....Peloton still leasing.

2005-10-04T07:35:00.000-06:00

Holt Lunsford buys Okla. brokerage
Acquisition will boost company's office divisionChristine Perez
Staff Writer
Holt Lunsford Commercial is shoring up its office division by acquiring the Dallas operations of Oklahoma City-based commercial brokerage firm Price Edwards & Co., a commercial brokerage.
The deal gives HLC an additional 1.1 million square feet of space to lease and manage; it also adds 15 employees to its ranks.
Company founder Holt Lunsford said the buyout made sense for both parties. Terms were not disclosed.
"It was always their (Price Edwards & Co.) intent to grow their Dallas operation, but after we visited for a while they realized it made more sense for us to grow the franchise and for them to focus on Oklahoma," he said. "They got comfortable selling because they felt they could continue, through our relationship, to do business in Dallas. And we're going to rely on their local expertise and knowledge for any projects we have in Oklahoma."
As part of the deal, HLC is taking over leasing and management of the Quadrangle, an eight-story, 130,000-square-foot property on Routh Street in Uptown, and Addison Circle One, a 10-story, 300,000-square-foot building off the Dallas North Tollway.
"This acquisition has introduced two high-profile assets into our portfolio," Lunsford said. "It sends a message that we handle world-class products."
Price Edwards & Co., a full-service commercial brokerage, was launched in 1988 by Ford Price and Carl Edwards, who jointly own the company. It oversees about 10 million square feet of office, retail and industrial space, as well as about 2,500 apartment units -- more than any other firm in Oklahoma City. It expanded into Dallas when some of its clients bought commercial properties here.
Lunsford launched his firm 12 years ago to work on industrial assignments for Principal Financial Group and others. The firm now oversees 22 million square feet of industrial space and ranks No. 2 on Dallas Business Journal's Top 25 list of Metroplex commercial property managers.
HLC began making a push into the office sector several years ago. Last year it joined forces with Champion Partners to buy Liberty Plaza, a two-building, 220,000-square-foot office complex off the Tollway on Keller Springs Road. It also brought on former Triad Commercial executive John Hoctor to direct the office division.
Hoctor said HLC's experience gives it an edge when it comes to recruiting.
"There are a lot of young companies out there, and some have just skyrocketed," he said. "They may be having difficulties keeping their arms around everything. This opens a door for us because we don't have those kinds of growing pains. We're an established company that has solid relationships with the best institutional ownership base in the city. So it's not a risk for young talent."
Lunsford said he plans to continue bulking up the office group.
"We think a good way to grow our third-party management and leasing business is to buy other companies," he said. "The key will be the merging of cultures and, with Price Edwards, we did a really good job. But we definitely plan to keep growing, one bite at a time."
cperez@bizjournals.com

Lofty plan for West End site

2005-10-03T07:38:00.000-06:00

Taking cues from downtown successes, developer plans apartments, shops

09:16 PM CDT on Friday, September 30, 2005
By SUZANNE MARTA / The Dallas Morning News

Spurred by growing demand for urban living and the buzz surrounding the ritzy Victory development, developers plan to convert a long-vacant West End building into loft apartments.
The historic six-story Purse Building, at 601 Elm St., is slated to house up to 70 residential units, plus some ground-level retail space, said Le Sare Carter, a partner with developer Barker-Nichols LLC.
Ms. Carter said the firm was encouraged by its early success with the Interurban Building at 1500 Jackson St., a downtown high-rise with 134 apartments, and the upscale Urban Market grocery store and eatery.
"Residential leasing is very strong downtown, and Victory will bring in a lot more people," she said.
The project reflects renewed interest in the West End, just as Hillwood's nearby $3 billion Victory development becomes more of a reality.
Already, the shell of the W hotel and condominium complex towers over the project, and luxury retailers and high-end restaurants are on the way.
During the last several years, the West End Historic District has lost some of its luster to newer, flashier developments in Uptown and on downtown's Main Street.
"We're going through growing pains," said Greg Schooley, executive director of the West End Association, adding that two significant buildings in the district, the Landmark Center and the West End Marketplace, are largely vacant.
But that could change with Victory opening next door.
"What Victory has spurred for us is a lot of real estate activity," Mr. Schooley said. "Right now there are a lot of deals and leases in the works."
Michael Puls, a real estate analyst with Foley & Puls Inc., said West End residential developments could find a sweet spot by being close to Victory's nightlife and retail offerings without the luxury prices.
"Victory could energize West End's residential market," Mr. Puls said.
Demand has been strong throughout downtown Dallas, where the center city's 2,200 for-lease units are more than 90 percent leased, said Kourtny Garrett, director of marketing for the Central Dallas Association.
The Purse Building was built by Parlin and Orrendorff Co. in 1905 as a regional warehouse for farm equipment. It's listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Texas Historical Commission.
The building was last used by Dallas County for office space but has been vacant since 1994.
Barker-Nichols plans to create 800- to 900-square-foot lofts that incorporate the building's 14-foot ceilings, oversized windows and brick-and-heavy timber construction.
Gary Pitts of BGO Architects is working on the design.
Rents would be priced similarly to other recently developed downtown apartments, Ms. Carter said.
E-mail smarta@dallasnews.com

REVIEW: Dirty Dozen belts out standards, hope

2005-10-03T07:33:00.000-06:00

07:43 AM CDT on Friday, September 30, 2005
By PARRY GETTELMAN / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

"When the Saints Go Marching In" is a song you can get pretty sick of, if you live in New Orleans. But when the Dirty Dozen Brass Band launched into a red-hot rendition Thursday night at a benefit for Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Dallas, it was hard for this particular evacuee not to get a little choked up and even harder to stand still.
The Uptown Strut Jazz Benefit, sponsored by Mayor Laura Miller's Dallas Foundation, drew a fairly staid crowd to the terrace outside the elegant Stoneleigh Hotel, but the Dozen got a small second line started with "Saints." An even longer line of well-dressed patrons snaked around the patio, waving paper napkins in the air, for another New Orleans classic, Professor Longhair's "Go to the Mardi Gras."
The crowd clapped enthusiastically, but was reluctant to dance at first, and stood a too-respectful distance from the stage. However, one determined woman from New Orleans' Uptown district, a guest at the hotel, kept pulling unsuspecting patrons up to join her ecstatic boogie.
"I needed this!" she proclaimed, grinning widely, after the first few songs. She managed to jump-start a small dancing contingent in front of the band; by the end of the night, most everybody was getting down to a version of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." That put some serious voodoo funk into the song.
The Dirty Dozen has had ups and downs over its long career, going through phases where it seemed to drift from its brass-band roots into less distinguished R&B just to widen its appeal. But the band was in peak form Thursday, combining the wild energy of a New Orleans street parade with technical finesse honed through years of international touring.
Trumpeter Efrem "E.T." Towns was the prime party instigator. He gave a warm shout-out to Texas, saying there had been a lot of rough things to go through lately, but enthusing, "I've also seen so many great things, and so many great people."
Mr. Towns' gravelly voice served the band almost as well as his bold trumpet, adding just the right hint of Louis Armstrong to the proceedings. And Mr. Towns blew a couple of minds at the end of the night when he started playing two horns simultaneously.
The Dirty Dozen's secret weapon, as always, was baritone-sax player Roger Lewis. He's a stoic presence onstage, but he's always got something interesting going on underneath it all. And his solos are models of funky concision. Thursday, he let loose with one insistent, percussive solo that made his instrument sound almost like an Australian didgeridoo.
The Dirty Dozen played one long, jazzy funk jam that could have been a master class for young jam bands, showing how to combine improvisation with tight ensemble work. But even more fun were second-line standards "Liza Jane," performed at high speed, and "I Used to Love Her (but It's All Over Now)," which made breaking up sound like a great excuse for a party.
E-mail pgettelman@yahoo.com

Good new for two Uptown Companies

2005-09-28T16:12:00.000-06:00

LATEST NEWS
Dallas Business Journal - 11:59 AM CDT Wednesday
Crosstex assets escape significant hurricane damage
Crosstex Energy L.P. on Wednesday said Hurricane Rita did not cause significant damage to its facilities in Texas and Louisiana.
Crosstex, a Dallas-based mid-stream natural gas company, said its facilities in Texas and Louisiana are, however, operating at reduced levels because of limited supply from producers.
The rates are expected to increase over the next few days and the company does not expect the decreased operation levels to impact its financial results.
Crosstex (Nasdaq: XTEX) operates more than 4.500 miles of pipeline, five processing plants and about 100 natural gas amine treating plants.
Web site: http://www.crosstexenergy.com/

LATEST NEWS
Dallas Business Journal - 5:31 PM CDT Tuesday
Sourcecorp wins $30M settlement
Sourcecorp Inc. has settled claims against the former owners of its operating subsidiary that was the subject of an internal investigation and financial restatement, and will receive $30 million in cash and stock.
Dallas-based Sourcecorp (Nasdaq: SRCP), a business process outsourcing company, said it would be paid $20 million in cash and receive 89,888 shares of Sourcecorp common stock.
Sourcecorp Chief Financial Officer Barry L. Edwards said the company's settlement agreement prohibits it from disclosing further details, including the names of the subsidiary's former owners.
The company said it will use the settlement proceeds to pay down debt.
Web site: www. sourcecorp.com

THis is my hometown and my dad, my brothers and I all worked here. It is pretty scary.

2005-09-27T16:21:00.000-06:00

W.R. Grace to asbestos victims: You're not so sick Associated Press
LIBBY -- Most of the 870 people under a medical plan for Libby-area residents sickened by asbestos exposure have been sent letters saying they no longer have asbestos-related disease, or may not be as sick as they thought.
About 700 people received the letters this month from HNA/Triveras, administrator of a medical plan for W.R. Grace & Co., which operated a vermiculite mine here until 1990. Some health authorities blame the mine for killing 200 people and sickening one of every eight residents.
One letter informed the medical plan's participants that a review by medical experts indicated they had no asbestos-related condition. The other letter acknowledged the presence of a "condition or illness" related to asbestos exposure. Each letter summarized medical benefits available to the recipient.
"I've been cured by Grace. It's a miracle," said Bob Stickney, who had been diagnosed with an asbestos-related disease. "I don't know how they can say at first you have asbestos disease, and now you don't." Stickney said he has health insurance, but is unsure it will cover care for asbestos exposure.
"Grace didn't have anything to do with that audit" on which the letters were based, said Greg Euston, Grace communications officer in Maryland. He referred a call seeking comment Monday to HNA's Dr. Jay Flynn in New Jersey. HNA said Flynn was not in his office and no one else could take the call.
Cuts in health benefits include a reduction in chest X-rays, said Tanis Hernandez of Libby's Center for Asbestos Related Disease. The reduced coverage provides a patient with one a year.
"Grace has apparently waved their hand across Libby and said, 'You're healed,"' said LeRoy Thom, a former mine worker who was sickened by asbestos and is vice chairman of the Center for Asbestos Related Disease.
He maintains the letters to residents were driven by Grace's push to trim responsibilities while the company operates under bankruptcy protection.
Grace's medical specialists use guidelines developed for people exposed to a type of asbestos different from the kind associated with the mine, said Dr. Alan Whitehouse of the Center for Asbestos Related Disease. The letters informing patients they do not have asbestosis are "nonsense," Whitehouse said.
The Libby Asbestos Medical Plan was funded by a $2.75 million court settlement between Grace and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, money earmarked to help pay for health-care needs not otherwise covered through Grace. Over the past three years, the Libby Asbestos Medical Plan has paid out more than $330,000 in benefits, Thom said.
A community group here has written Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., for help in establishing a medical trust fund. The group estimates the fund eventually would need $250 million to fully cover the asbestos-related medical needs in Libby.

Construction Update

2005-09-24T10:13:00.000-06:00

Crescent construction
All those construction fences on the north side of Uptown's Crescent complex aren't for another condo project or office addition.
Work crews are fixing water and erosion problems on that corner of the building.
The area beneath the Cedar Springs Road and Pearl Street corner includes the complex's huge underground parking garage.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Maybe all this Condo Craziness is a good thing and exactly what the city needs. In LA they are trying to get them built and they help clean the air.

2005-09-22T09:09:00.000-06:00

Clear and Present Danger
Designer Air - A clean city looks a lot like L.A.’s growth around transit stations
by GLORIA OHLAND

It’s ironic that Los Angeles, a city that’s maligned as traffic-choked and strip-malled and pilloried as the poster city for smog and sprawl, is emerging as one of the country’s premier laboratories for sustainable planning and design. Under the pressures of growth, traffic, and shifting demographics, the metropolis is undergoing a metamorphosis, becoming denser and reorganizing itself around its many centers and transportation corridors.It’s become clear that while new rail lines and a Prius in every garage are important parts of the solution to the air-quality problem in Southern California, an equally important strategy — and one that’s much less expensive — is for the region to change the way it grows. Southern California needs to grow up like a city, not out into ever farther-flung suburbs. Most new development should be constructed in higher-density, multi-family lofts and condos — not single-family homes — primarily around rail stations and bus corridors.Every three years local governments have to come up with a transportation plan and submit it to the federal government to prove the region will be in compliance with the Clean Air Act. If it’s not, the federal government will yank billions of dollars in federal transportation funding and the region could have a serious funding jones (the feds provide more than half of all transportation funding). It’s not an idle threat. In the ’90s, after decades of unplanned growth and road-building in Atlanta — then said to have undergone the largest geographic expansion of any urban area in history — the federal government pulled funding, making national headlines.It was really, really bad PR, and it sent Atlanta’s boomtown economy into a tailspin from which it’s still not recovered. To avoid a similar fate, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG is the agency responsible for coming up with this all-important transportation plan here) has had to get increasingly creative as development continues to push out toward Las Vegas and San Diego. Vast, verdant Riverside County, which is rapidly being diced into five-acre ranchettes, is the fastest-growing county in the fastest-growing state, and people continue to drive their Escalades and Navigators from here (most jobs are in L.A. and Orange counties) to there (while new housing is going up in both Riverside and San Bernardino counties). The reason the air got cleaner over the past couple of decades had to do mostly with technological fixes — catalytic converters, cleaner fuel — but technology has taken the region about as far as it can go until scientists make the next leap to... Who knows? Hydrogen fuel? So the most recent transportation plan took a new tack: Here in Southern California, the place that practically invented sprawl, SCAG’s 83-member Regional Council agreed upon what it calls the “2 Percent Strategy,” which directs all new development and population growth (an estimated six million more people by 2030) onto just 2 percent of the land. This is less fantastic than it seems considering the six-county SCAG region comprises 38,000 square miles (L.A., Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties).In the past the region has been able to show conformity by investing huge sums in new highways and new rail lines to ease congestion. And indeed, this plan, too, would invest $210 billion in rail and highways by 2030. But here’s the kick: While 50 percent of emissions reductions needed for conformity with the Clean Air Act (and those federal dollars) will come from that $210 billion investment, the other 50 percent of emissions reductions comes from encouraging development in existing city centers, around rail stations, and in transportation corridors. “While the transportation improvements cost billions of dollars,” notes SCAG executive director Mark Pisano, “the emissions benefits that come from changing land use are free.”But there’s even more bang for the buck, adds Pisano: Building higher-density housing near transit in existing communities can be expected to boost transit ridership by 30 percent (since that’s where transit is located) and reduce housing costs by 25-30 percent (since higher-density housing is less expensive than suburban single-family homes). “Given the dramatic need to increase both transit ridership and housing affordability, opposing this plan was hard to do,” says Pisano. Indeed, the Regional Council’s vote was unanimous.This isn’t a pipe dream. Changing demographics in the region (and all across the U.S.) combined with traffic are completely revamping the American dream of a house in the suburbs with a two-car garage. Traffic is causing people to live in ever-smaller geographies — live, work and play close to home! — because unless you take the Rapid bus down Wilshire, a trip from Eastside to Westside or vice versa isn’t any fun anymore.The shift in demographics is seismic. Married couples with kids — the demographic group that made up the majority of households not too long ago — now account for just 25 percent of the population, a percentage that will fall to 20 percent in a few years. Single adults — aging baby boomers and younger echo boomers — will soon be the new majority, and how many single adults want to live in a single-family home in the suburbs? Lofts, live-work spaces, condos and row houses in 24/7 urban neighborhoods with art and bars and arthouse film theaters are the housing type that’s preferred.The real-estate market is changing dramatically.PricewaterhouseCoopers, which annually surveys 500 developers, investors and real-estate industry leaders for its venerable “Emerging Trends in Real Estate” report, this year ranked locations near transit as the No. 1 choice for all development types – residential, commercial, office and retail.That’s why SCAG’s 2 Percent Strategy is supported not only by city officials but also by developers and the real-estate industry, and even the hugely influential (and generous with political contributions) Building Industry Association of Southern California, which includes all the big-time suburban-home builders like Kaufman and Broad.“We’ve always wanted to build in urban neighborhoods but it’s been too hard,” confides Kirk Roloff of Archstone-Smith, a big national developer that just bought the still-under-construction Del Mar Station on the Gold Line in downtown Pasadena. “Now the market is making it worthwhile.” Adds Tony Salazar of another national development company, McCormack Baron Salazar, “Besides, in a place like L.A. there’s really nowhere else left to build.”Planner John Fregonese from Portland, the consultant who helped SCAG move toward consensus on the 2 Percent Strategy, concurs. “In Denver or Dallas there’s still a choice of where to develop, but Southern California is the densest, most urbanized U.S. metropolis. Planners here may toy with the idea of Portland-style densities but the real model should be Manhattan or Chicago. The region is expected to add another six million residents by 2030 — the biggest growth spurt since the 1950s. Growth pressures here will continue to be inexorable and immutable.”Not to worry. L.A. County alone has 500 miles of urban and commuter rail and more than 100 stations, and another 15 miles of urban rail and 15 stations in the pipeline. The rail network is supported by 2,300 buses and 18,500 bus stops, the number of Metro Rapid bus corridors is being expanded from 11 to 28 in three years, and L.A.’s first bus rapid-transit corridor, with 12 stations, opens this fall. This transit network — instead of the sprawl-inducing emission-producing network of roads — can become the armature for more compact growth patterns that make it possible to walk, bike and take transit instead of drive everywhere — and to breathe cleaner air.

Law firm and Insurance company move into 3333 Lee Parkway

2005-09-22T08:57:00.000-06:00

GlobeSt.com EXCLUSIVE: Boutique Law Firm Shifts to Uptown

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 By Connie Gore

DALLAS-In a quietly orchestrated move, the three-year-old Shackelford, Melton & McKinley law firm has relocated to a class A mid-rise in Uptown. Sources say the firm's partners made the move with a 12-year lease in hand.
The boutique firm moved to 3333 Lee Parkway over the weekend, exiting the McFarlan Building at 10100 N. Central Expressway to get more room and become the second largest tenant in the 233,543-sf mid-rise, owned by Fort Worth-based Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. Shackelford, Melton & McKinley leased all of the 10th floor, part of the fifth and 3,000 sf of street-level space. As part of the pact, the law firm got expansion rights for the fifth floor in a deal pulled together by its broker, John Amend with the Amend Group, who also occupies space in the Uptown building, and Crescent's leasing team of Michael Lewis, senior vice president, and Tony Click, vice president.
The law firm took over space given back awhile ago by WebLink Wireless Inc. With the law firm now firmly seated, the 12-story building is 68% leased to 32 tenants, setting up a dealmaking scenario for space with a quoted rate of $20 per sf plus electric. Financial firm Gainsco Inc. is the lead tenant with 40,000 sf.
The 25-member firm has earmarked the first-floor space, within eyeshot of the sidewalk, for a fee attorney's office to handle closings. The space planning has put the litigation and real estate groups on the 10th floor and the transactional team on the fifth.

New Victory Hotel Condo Project coming from Hong Kong-based Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group

2005-09-21T15:05:00.000-06:00

Mandarin planning Dallas hotel-condo project
02:36 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 21, 2005
By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Another slick hotel and condominium project is in the works for the Victory project in Dallas' Uptown neighborhood.
Hong Kong-based Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and Victory developer Hillwood are planning a project to be built near the American Airlines Center arena. The luxury hotel company – with flagship properties in Hong Kong and Bangkok – has more than 8,000 hotel rooms in 17 countries.
The company also is building combination hotel and condo projects in Boston and Chicago.
Officials in the Mandarin Oriental's New York office wouldn't talk about plans for the Dallas hotel. "We do not have any announcement to make at this time," said Danielle DeVoe, vice president of communications.
And top officers of developer Hillwood said while they aren't ready to announce a project, they say they aren't surprised to hear that word is out about the deal. "We continue to try and push the envelope here," said Hillwood Capital president Jonas Woods.
Real estate brokers expect a formal announcement in the next few weeks.
Founded in the 1960s, the Mandarin Oriental company operates six hotels in the U.S.
In Boston a 149-room Mandarin Oriental hotel with condominiums is under construction and will open in 2007.
And the company has a 250-room hotel and condo tower planned to open in Chicago in 2008.
In Victory, construction is underway on the 33-story W Dallas Victory Hotel & Residences with 144 condominiums and 251 hotel rooms.
And Houston-based developer Hanover Co. has broken ground at Victory on a 28-story apartment tower called Cirque with 252 rental units.
E-mail stevebrown@dallasnews.com

We do love to munch on sushi while goggling at lunch...Good article on what is going on in office leasing.

2005-09-20T07:35:00.000-06:00

IN DEPTH: COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

From the September 16, 2005 print edition

National survey reveals commercial real estate trends in Houston

A national survey from Black's Guide, which compiles data for commercial real estate brokers, owners, developers, property managers and tenants, reveals trends about the Texas commercial real estate market:
Most popular amenity. Food service is the most popular building amenity requested by Texas tenants today, with WiFi coming in second.
Challenges to leasing. Houston and Dallas respondents cite "excess inventory" as their greatest challenge in leasing space today. "Creating product differentiation" is the second-greatest challenge.
Industry leasing most space. "Banking/finance" leads as the industry leasing the most commercial space in Houston and Dallas. The medical industry and oil/energy industries also have a strong presence in leasing commercial space in Texas.
Industry outlook. Respondents in both Houston and Dallas say they feel confident that business will be as good or better in the next six months as in the prior six months (93 percent for Houston, 89 percent for Dallas).
Space requirements. The majority of Houston respondents (71 percent) and Dallas respondents (75 percent) cite 1,000 to 10,000 square feet as the average space requirement over the past six months.
Deal value. Nearly one-third (33 percent) of Houston respondents had average leasing deals in 2005 worth between $100,000 and $500,000; 15 percent, between $500,001 and $1 million; and 10 percent, between $1 million and $2 million. In Dallas, 49 percent put their average deal between $100,000 and $500,000; 17 percent, between $500,001 and $1 million; 2.9 percent, between $1 million and $2 million; and 5.8 percent, between $2 million and $3 million.
Deal length. Three- to five-year leases dominate the market in Houston (69 percent) and Dallas (62 percent).
Greatest challenge to new development. Open-ended responses include:
"City of Houston permitting department" -- Houston property manager.
"An excess of current construction in far north Dallas and a looming presence of construction in Uptown. Feels like the '80s all over again!" -- Dallas broker
"Erratic Dallas marketplace. Equity Office is pulling out of Dallas/Fort Worth for this reason." -- Dallas broker
Feeling confident
Nationwide, 89 percent of commercial real estate professionals participating in the survey say they feel confident that business will be as good or better in the next six months as in the prior six months. This confidence follows a half-decade slump in the commercial real estate industry.
"The results of our first CRE Trends Survey demonstrate that the commercial real estate industry is experiencing signs of consistent growth after a sluggish five years," says Ed Barnes, vice president and general manager of Black's Guide. "Commercial real estate professionals are back into problem-solving mode ... looking for the kind of creative solutions and high-quality information that gets deals done."
The survey found that certain markets had a decidedly more optimistic industry outlook than others. Orlando, Fla., is the most optimistic city of those surveyed: 51 percent of Orlando's respondents anticipated their average current space requirement to increase in the coming six months
Denver had the second most positive outlook with 50 percent anticipating an increase. In third place was Tampa, Fla., with 45 percent of respondents predicting an increase. The two Florida cities both also cited an increase in average space requirements over the past six months.
Amenities and challenges
Rather than focusing on where tenants will come from, industry professionals are focusing on the increased demands of new tenants such as WiFi and food services and the challenges of accelerating development such as traffic issues and delays in construction permits, the survey shows.
WiFi was cited as the most popular amenity being requested by tenants today. Coming in at No. 2 was food services. Health clubs came in third. Some interesting amenities being asked for are:
"24/7 air conditioning for computers" (South Florida).
"Sustainable/green practices within the facility" (New Jersey).
"High-end restaurants" (Dallas).
Lack of parking topped the list nationwide as the biggest challenge to leasing commercial space today, but naturally certain markets differed on this question, pointing to the unique challenges that influence or afflict individual markets.
Nearly 1,000 commercial real estate professionals nationwide participated in the survey. This respondent pool was drawn from the Black's Guide online registered-user database which consists of over 18,000 commercial real estate professionals -- largely brokers, property managers and developers -- in 19 markets the company serves around the country.
Thora Qaddumi