KNOCKING THE TREES AROUND PEGGY SHIFFICK PARK 
The duplex at 720 Bomar St. adjacent to East Montrose’s tiny Peggy Shiffick Park is back on the market, a week and a half after its prospective purchaser, developer Vinod Ramani of Urban Living, scaled back his plans to build 3 townhomes on the site (pictured at left) to just 2, and just a few days after backing out of the deal altogether. Some neighbors concerned the planned 3-1/2-story townhomes would clip a large portion of the branches and roots of the park’s signature oak tree had opposed 2 variance requests Ramani had submitted for the project. In the meantime, both Urban Living and neighborhood groups were alarmed to discover that city-contracted workers had severed the main roots of large trees on the property at the corner of Bomar and Crocker earlier this month while installing sewer-line connections. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Image: Urban Living
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Buying and Selling
It “only” took 987 days to sell her Pearland home, Jenny Lawson announces. But did the Bloggess — and now bestselling author — shirk on that “No Zombies — sort of” guarantee she had offered on her single-story David Weekly model in Southern Trails back in 2010 when she first put it on the market? “In the middle of signing all of the paperwork,” she writes, “I mentioned to Victor that we should probably disclose that we buried that-guy-I-couldn’t-remember-the-name-of in our yard years ago and Victor looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Probably because you’re not supposed to say that in front of realtors. Then Victor told me to be quiet, but I mentioned that we’d probably go to hell for not digging the guy back up. Then Victor explained that I was talking about a saint I’d buried upside down in our front lawn to help sell the house and the realtor looked at us like we were insane because apparently she’s not Catholic. And technically neither are we, but at the time we were pretty desperate to sell the house and I was willing to bury just about anyone in the yard to stop having to pay two mortgages.”
“Better see the Telephone Museum while you can,” a tipster tells Swamplot. “Word is it’s sold.” But our tipster doesn’t know who the buyer of the Heights’ AT&T building is. The 3-story, 77,456-sq.-ft. structure at 1714 Ashland St.— it’s got a basement too — was put up for sale earlier this year for $3.1 million. It comes with 113 parking spaces on the 1.65 acre-lot, plus 55 spaces on a half-acre spot across the street. The museum is on the building’s second floor; the structure was built in 1957.
Update: The museum will be out of there by December 1st, Charlotte Aguilar reports.
Weingarten Realty has at last sold the 2.08-acre parcel under the Fiesta Mart on Studewood at 14th St. — to a Houston developer of assisted-living and independent-living complexes. Bridgewood Properties, the company behind the Village of Meyerland complex under construction at 4141 N. Braeswood Blvd. near Stella Link on the site of the former Rutlege Apartments and the Village at the Woodlands Waterway, plans to build a 4-story, 80-unit building in place of the grocery store — with independent-living apartments on the top floor, a bottom floor for “memory care” patients, and 2 floors of assisted-living units sandwiched in between. Fiesta’s lease expires in January; Bridgewood plans to begin building a “Craftsman style” structure in its place shortly thereafter, which should take 16 to 18 months to finish.
- Goodbye Studewood Fiesta; hello boutique senior living [The Leader]
- *Updated* New use in store for Heights Fiesta Mart [Prime Property]
- 1407 Studewood [Moody Rambin]
- Communities [Bridgewood Properties]
- Previously on Swamplot: Heights Grocery: Not Gone Yet
Photo: Swamplot inbox
EAST OF DOWNTOWN, AND NO ONE’S BITING 
“I need help,” writes the would-be seller of this townhome just north of the railroad tracks from East Downtown, a day after cutting the asking price down to $254,900. (It originally sold for $236K back in 2008.) “I read Swamplot daily and love seeing what your astute commenters have to say. I’ve lived in the Houston area my entire life but am new to selling a house around here. I’ve had my townhouse on the market for a few weeks now but haven’t had much traffic. I’m wondering if this is normal around here or maybe there’s just not enough buzz for my house. Is the pricing all wrong? Are the pictures awful? Is my agent doing enough (umm… Hi, mom!)? Is my ’hood too early in the gentrification stage? It really is a great house and a pretty cool neighborhood if I do say so myself! I’d love some advice from folks in the know.” [Swamplot inbox]
Back in April, former Bootsie’s Heritage Cafe chef Randy Rucker gave up on plans to open a new restaurant in the holdout parcel (above and at bottom right in the photo at right) behind the Asia Society Texas building. Now that property’s owner, Balcor Commercial, is giving up on it as well. The 3,624-sq.-ft. former doctors’ office on a 11,700-sq.-ft. lot at 5219 Caroline was listed for sale earlier this month for just a tad under $1.5 million. The property traded hands for $907K back in July of 2010, when Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s steamy building next door was just a muddy construction site. Renovations of the Caroline building for Rucker’s conÄt never began. “Unfortunately, converting the Caroline property into a fully functional restaurant while maintaining the integrity and design of the structure turned out to be a challenge,” an owner’s rep tells Swamplot.
KINDER MORGAN WORKOUTS OUT OF DOWNTOWN GARAGE 
The health club up there on the 8th floor of the Travis Place Parking Garage (see it? you gotta squint) at the corner of Travis and McKinney streets downtown is no longer a dedicated workout space for Kinder Morgan employees. The pipeline and terminal company has sold the 25,000-sq.-ft. facility at 1010 Travis St. to Redstone Companies Hospitality, operators of the Houstonian Club at the Houstonian and a couple of other downtown clubs. It’s now called the Health Club at Travis Place and open to general memberships. A Redstone rep reports the club buildout dates back to the days when the structure belonged to Tenneco. Photo: Redstone Companies Hospitality
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE SAME BOAT “. . . When talking to people looking for stuff in Montrose, this is what I hear: 1) Nothing available 2) Over priced for what you get 3) By the time you try to take it, someone else already has 4) What you do get will have bad electric, bad roof, bad pipes, sketchy tenants, etc. 5) Was built in the 60′s most likely. Doesn’t have it’s cert of occupancy, no water pressure, low insulation, old windows, etc. Then I like to joke that this is what I hear from people trying to BUY apartments in Montrose. Point being, the challenges you face as a renter are the challenges you face as an investor. And the solutions are often the same: Network with owners, jump on something good if you see it, communicate with the property manager showing if you don’t like the place (this is big), look every day. . . .” [Cody, commenting on Comment of the Day: What’s the Thought Process?]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY THERE’LL BE NO 1301 RICHMOND REDO AT THAT SELLING PRICE “At 2.9 acres of physical land, and a purchase price of X (let’s assume priced to the dirt, likely $50/foot) they are in this deal for $6MM dollars day one. If they wanted to be in the business of renovating (This IS income producing property, not pride of ownership single family housing) and retaining the character of the original complex, look at the math . . . assuming a coverage ratio of 1/1, and average unit @ 1000 square feet, that gives you 120 units and 120,000 to renovate meticulously. Assuming you would have to put $20,000 into each unit to justify buying this deal, you’ve now got $6MM + $2.4MM in renovation dollars, plus the fact you’ve got to kick everybody out of their unit to renovate it, do the work, then relet the unit. So, that puts you at 1 year of ZERO revenue, and whatever associated costs there are there. For the sake of argument, your all-in is $10MM. THEN, after you have painfully restored a garden complex to the delight of yourself (I promise you the neighborhood won’t come out and bring you a check for your efforts to retain transient renters for another 50 years), here is your reality: 1) you would need to jump rents from $800/month to $1200 or greater, lease them all, then sell at a benchmark cap rate exit for such a non-conforming product, and that’s assuming you get your investors interested in the capital and scope in the first place, rather than buiding a 2.5:1 ratio development against $50 dirt 2) you would need to find an exit partner with just as much interest in running this model as you did creating it. institutional buyers that are willing to overlook the latest TCC Alexan product to buy a risky retrofitted low coverage ratio multi family deal in a market that has very little inventory of trailblazing like product. what i’m saying is this won’t exist, so you’re stuck with cash flow now. So . . . you have $10MM in it, and if you are the greatest level of execution here, you are 7 years of revenue before you are whole on your initial investment, and you have a huge chunk of change parked in it, with zero recap abilities. if i run a bank, i’m not cashing you out of that mistake.” [HTX Rez, commenting on Report: Castle Court Midrise Planned for Andover Richmond Apartments Site]
Tenants of the Andover Richmond Apartments at 1301 Richmond Ave. near Graustark got notice today that the complex has been sold to an entity connected to investment company Behringer Harvard. One of them writes in: “I hope the Swamplot team can stay on top of this one since this 2.9 acre plot was earlier rumored to be on Trammell Crow’s Alexan radar. BH is a big REIT player but I can’t find much information about their history regarding redevelopment of acquired properties. I fear same fate will befall us here as those at Chateau on Greenbriar.”
Photo: Swamplot inbox
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE LOWDOWN ON THE ELEVATION BURGER LEASE 
“Update on this corner: Elevation Burger is set to open up in the near future. Jonathan Kagan Properties bought the property and did a fairly extensive update to the structure, then turned it over to Elevation Burger for their build out, which is currently well under way.
Trust me, Mai Thai’s closing was a good thing. I own the property next door and saw a steady parade of roaches, rats, and various other vermin going in and out of that building over the past few years. Anytime you see a blue tarp on the roof of a building for months and months on end, it’s a pretty sure sign that they are in decline. If you don’t have the funds to fix your leaky roof in Houston, the end can’t be far off.” [Jared M, commenting on Bye Bye, Mai Thai? Feeding Another Kirby High-Rise Rumor]
A bit more detail on those new Downtown apartments developer Marvy Finger wants to build on the site of the Ben Milam Hotel designed in 1929 by architect Joseph Finger, a block beyond the leftfield fence of Minute Maid Park. The long-vacant hotel, which sits past the foul line at the corner of Texas and Crawford, is toast, Finger tells the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff. But the demo site will make up only a portion of the property.
HOW HAR AGENTS GET THOSE GLOWING REVIEWS ONLINE 
HAR’s pioneering ratings program for real-estate agents gets a bit of scrutiny from the Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money magazine. Among the amazing stats: A mere 1.4 percent of all ratings on HAR come in at less than 4 stars; meanwhile, on Angie’s List 5.9 percent of real-estate-agent reviews have equivalent “mediocre to poor” scores, and on Yelp the number is 18.5 percent. Agents participating in the Houston Association of Realtors program earn an average rating of 4.94 out of 5. How do they chalk up such glowing reviews? “In reality, that 4.94 represents the average score of just 12 percent of the association’s agents. Another 7 percent participate in the rating program but don’t make their results public. The rest — some 17,000 real estate pros — don’t get rated at all, either by choice or because they haven’t completed enough transactions. The group surveys only customers who have closed deals, leaving out everyone who, satisfied or not, walked away. Those qualifications help explain why fewer than 0.3 percent of the Houston agents have been awarded a low one-star rating by their clients — a figure that seems to defy reality, given all the things that can go wrong in a home deal. (The association says low-rated agents often opt out of the program.)” Reporter Alyssa Abkowitz quotes Katy agent Patricia Gant about the one black mark that brought her overall rating down to a comparatively low 4.4 out of 5 stars: “I would’ve never sent [a survey] to her,” she says, “if I’d had any idea that she’d give me one star.” [Smart Money]
Residents of the Cambridge Court Apartments at 6500 S. Gessner will get to stay until the end of their leases, but after that they’ll need to find new homes. That’s the word from the complex’s neighbor and new owner, Strake Jesuit. The Catholic boys’ high school is also the property’s old owner; the 7.55 acres the apartments sit on is a portion of the land Strake Jesuit lost as a result of a 1971 bankruptcy. Developer Harold Farb built what was then called the Newport Apartments on the site 6 years later.
School officials plan to tear down the complex “at the earliest possible date” and use the land, which sits just north of the school’s Gessner driveway, for parking and athletic fields. The acquisition will also allow planners to “re-examine where it will construct its new Science and Engineering Building on the campus without a net loss of parking or green space,” the school announced.
- Jesuit Reacquires Portion of Land Lost 40 Years Ago [Strake Jesuit]
Photos: Strake Jesuit (aerial), Apartments.com (Cambridge Court Apartments)
COMMENT OF THE DAY RUNNER-UP: COWARDS SHAPE THE CITY “. . . Has it ever occurred to you that developers (whose core competency is development) develop apartment complexes for long-term investors and operators? What you refer to as cutting and running is actually just an element of their business model. It is a hand-off of ownership from one entity preferring stability to another that demands it. Neither entity is assured of stability, however. A developer can’t pretend (with a straight face) to know what is in store for a nation, a metropolitan area, or a submarket over a five-year period of planning, permitting, financing, construction, the first year of lease-up, the second year of burning through concessions, and the third year of stability so that they can generate a reliable set of T-12 profit and loss figures. As it turns out, they have to make an educated guess about the future, close their eyes, hold their nose, and jump in. The business model may be different, however the same lesson is analogous for subdivision developers and home buyers, too. They can only try their best to make the right decision, then hope for the best. But eventually . . . they all sell. Everybody sells. The only consequential purpose in owning real estate is to be able to sell it. If selling something is cutting and running, then our entire society is founded on cowardice.” [TheNiche, commenting on Comment of the Day: The Shelf Life of Apartment Complexes]