Harwood Boosts Dallas Mixed-Use District With Office Acquisition

District of Harwood. Image courtesy of Harwood International

Harwood International, in partnership with Waterfall Asset Management, has acquired the 226,000-square-foot, Class A Citymark building in the Uptown area of Dallas. According to Yardi Matrix, the purchase was accompanied by a $46.8 million loan from First United Bank & Trust and the seller was Bradford. Previous owners included Hines Interests and Centex, also per Yardi Matrix information. Morgan Staub and Rob Steinwedell of Harwood International negotiated the purchase.

READ ALSO: Major Dallas Mixed-Use Secures $108M Financing

The property located at 3100 McKinnon St. is on a 3.7-acre site and consists of an 11-story office tower, a four-level parking garage and a 0.5-acre developable parcel with about 200 feet of frontage along McKinnon Street. Citymark was completed in 1985 and underwent cosmetic renovations earlier this year. It was 66 percent leased at the time of sale. 

A stronger submarket than most

Harwood has more than 11 million square feet of developable rights for its now 19–city block District of Harwood, totaling more than $4 billion of office, retail, and residential development. To date, Harwood has developed 4.3 million square feet in the District, including 10 buildings, seven restaurants, a museum and 8.5 acres of gardens.

Recent additions are Bleu Ciel, a 33-story condominium tower designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte and HDF, and the Rolex Building, designed by Kengo Kuma and HDF. In July, the Rolex Building was honored by Engineering News-Record as its 2019 Global Best Project winner in the Office category.

Harwood No. 10 is the latest office development. The 22-story Class A office tower features 220,548 rentable square feet of office and more than 14,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space. Harwood No. 12 was recently submitted for city approval and would encompass about 500,000 square feet of office and retail space. The tower will be the tallest in Uptown and feature an observation deck, sky lounge, garden amenity deck and ground-floor restaurants. Finally, Harwood Hospitality Group is well underway with a 22-story boutique hotel in the District, which has a Walk Score of 92 and recently opened a direct connection to the 3.5-mile Katy Trail.

In a March Q&A with Commercial Property Executive, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings noted Harwood’s active role in developing Uptown. The company, he said, “has been slowly buying up land, and every time they buy up land something goes vertical…”.

The Uptown submarket enjoys both lower availability—20.8 percent—and higher average rents—at $34.69 per square foot—than the Dallas–Fort Worth office market overall, according to a second-quarter report from Savills. The latter, in fact, is the highest of any submarket in the metro.

Though the metro office market has been quite stable, several large deals drove second-quarter office leasing to a five-year high. The list includes Lockheed Martin’s 431,579-square-foot lease at 5401 N. Beach St. in Northeast Fort Worth, Tenet Healthcare’s relocation to International Plaza I and law firm Kane Russell Coleman Logan PC’s move to Dallas’ tallest office building, the 72-story Bank of America Plaza.