Dallas Office Towers Get New Owners, New Resolution

By Georgiana Mihaila, Associate Editor

Granite Properties’ acquisition of a 12-story office tower in Uptown Dallas and the recent sale of the vacant 52-story Elm Place have held industry headlines this past week.

The 12-story office tower at 3333 Lee Parkway in Uptown Dallas traded for an undisclosed sum, the Dallas Business Journal reported. Plano-based Granite Properties, the buyer, was represented in house by Will Hendrickson and Paul Bennett, while seller Equastone was represented by CB Richard Ellis’ Gary Carr and Eric Mackey. The 232,560-square-foot metal-and-glass tower overlooking Lee Park—built by Hines in 1983—consists of six levels of subterranean parking, a total of 4,539 spaces. The Class A office building is located in the Uptown/Turtle Creek submarket, which boasts 52 percent higher rental rates than the average Dallas-area market. Currently, the building is 92 percent leased, Gainsco Inc. occupying 23 percent of it as lead tenant.

The Elm Place high-rise at 1401 Elm St. in Dallas also changed owners this past week, being purchased for $19 million by a group of Eastern European investors active in the Northern California market. According to the Dallas Business Journal, the new owners—represented in the sale by Jim Sobel of Colliers’ San Francisco office—plan on investing $125 million to redevelop the project. Plans call for a high-rise office, residential and retail space.

The former Elm Street First National Bank tower, built in 1964, encompasses 864,702 square feet of office space in 43 stories, with another 428,884 square feet on the lower nine floors. The building has been standing vacant since 2010, when owner SCI ROEV and co-owner LNR Partners—which had the lower nine floors—shut its doors because of low occupancy rates.