COMMENTS OF THE DAY: LAS ALAMEDAS PACKS UP “I drove by yesterday and there were two large U-Haul trucks backed up to the back door. I think Las Alamedas is toast. What a shame; I’ve had many good times there.” And later: “Well, I drove by a couple of hours ago and the sign out front says something like ‘Thank you for 28 great years. We will relocate.’†[Clive, commenting on Las Alamedas: Landlord Wants More]
Sign up for the Newsletter
Commercial Real Estate
The Fiesta on the corner of Studewood and 14th St. in the Heights still has “a couple more years” left on its lease, but Weingarten Realty has put the property up for sale.
The 28,466-sq.-ft. grocery store sits on a 1.76 acre site. Also included: 2 neighboring lots off Algregg St. used for parking and a third with a bungalow-turned shop on it.
Ready for the market: the site of the Great Tuscan Wedding Fantasy Crash of ’08! Listing agent Bill Burge says the sellers of the wedding venue in Garden Oaks once known as the Tuscany Gardens and Villa will be asking $4.5 million.
The Tuscany of Garden Oaks, at 835 W. 34th St., was built from the ashes of the famed Bill Mraz Ballroom, by Titus Inc. — operators of that other wedding stage set on Chimney Rock, Bella Terrazza. Titus of course is better known as the company that stranded all those brides and grooms without the $2 million in deposits they had paid for their weddings before Hurricane Ike hit. (Though maybe the company isn’t quite so well known: HCAD lists the property’s owner as “Tutus Inc.”)
We all know the ending: Rachael Ray swooped in and gave that big de-Tuscanized group wedding in the middle of the baseball field at Minute Maid Park — and 33 couples got to get married on teevee for free! Happily ever after, right? Well, almost.
Last week the Houston Business Journal reported that the owner of Las Alamedas had reached agreement on a new lease with its landlord and would reopen on February 6th. But the upscale Mexican restaurant on the Katy Freeway at Voss is still closed.
What happened to that agreement?
“The landlord came back and wanted at least 50 percent more rent and other things that we didn’t originally agree on,†says [restaurant owner Jorge] Sneider.
Sneider had previously told reporter Allison Wollam that the original landlord died in a plane crash, and various surviving family members had been fighting over ownership of the property for the last year and a half. “He now hopes he can work out another lease in a couple of weeks,” Wollam reports today.
- News from the food and drink front [Houston Business Journal]
- Las Alamedas Lease Lapsed? [Swamplot]
Photo: Rachel Dvoretzky
There’s a lot of junk for sale in this tiny Norhill storefront: Thermoses from the 1970s, a bouffant-hairstyle catalog, a 1967 Delta Zeta sorority photo, hand-painted cans of Campbell’s Soup, and — writes Kelly Klaasmeyer in the Houston Press — “what is possibly the world’s largest extant collection of macramé owls.”
Who would want any of this stuff? Even the owner wants to be done with it:
[Bill] Davenport decided to get rid of stuff because of a move. “I had to move all my junk over from storage, and I thought, ‘Oh no, this can’t go on.’ I had to look at everything as I unpacked it.” As a result, he started thinking that maybe he didn’t need all of it.
Davenport and Francesca Fuchs, both artists, bought the 4,320-sq.-ft. 1930 commercial building at 1125 E. 11th St. (off Studewood) more than 2 years ago. After 16 months of renovations, they recently moved in upstairs with their kids. And Davenport opened Bill’s Junk in one of the retail spaces downstairs:
Buyers didn’t show up for the latest sale at the old JCPenney building next to West Oaks Mall. So Wachovia Bank will foreclose on the property soon, the CoStar Group reports.
The bankruptcy trustee for the collapsed financial empire of Edward H. Okun had listed the vacant building, which Okun’s 1031 Tax Group had bought for $4 million. But no buyers were willing to pay even the amount of the financing, which was $3 million.
The Houston JCPenney building and a mall in Salina, Kansas — also now facing foreclosure — are Okun’s last remaining properties.
- Trustee’s Newsletter #12 [The 1031 Tax Group Bankruptcy Trustee]
- Last of Okun Empire Will End in Foreclosure [CoStar Group]
- Previously in Swamplot: West Oaks Mall Bankruptcy Sale: JCPenneys on the Dollar, West Oaks Mall: Your Exchanges Are No Good Here
The University of Houston has been given the go-ahead by the system’s Board of Regents to negotiate the purchase of the University Business Park, the 69-acre former Schlumberger Technologies corporate headquarters complex that faces I-45 South, just east of UH’s central campus.
The university currently leases 150,000 square feet in the business park, for offices “and other uses.” The new campus extension would be used for academic and research programs, administrative offices, storage, “industry partnerships,” and other functions. And it comes with 30 acres of vacant land.
UH has already completed the purchase of an adjacent 5-acre site, for about $2.5 million:
IS THAT THREE BROTHERS BAKERY ON THE LINE? A spokesperson for Weingarten Realty reports the company has “a number of good prospects” to lease the second-story space in the semi-curved replacement building that caused all that fuss over at the River Oaks Shopping Center. Earlier this week, Tony Vallone announced he’s backing out of plans to open a new Italian restaurant in the space: “. . . the recent flak between neighbors and developer Weingarten Realty on such points as the building’s setbacks and the use of the patio were not factors in pulling the plug, he said, adding the discourse was full of misinformation. Vallone said, for example, rumors were circulated that the patio would have been used, at times, as a band venue, which would not have been the case. ‘I would never do anything to jeopardize the relationship with the neighborhood,’ Vallone said.” [River Oaks Examiner; previously]
A question from a Swamplot reader:
My husband and I lost our Heights bungalow (and the hundred-year-old oaks that shaded it) to Hurricane Ike. We have decided donate the remnants of the house to Historic Houston for salvage, sell our lot . . . and use our insurance settlement to pursue our dream of purchasing an older commercial building, like an old two-story brick grocery store, somewhere inside the loop in the $200K – $350 range, 3000 – 4000 sq. ft., for mixed use as a residence upstairs and studio space/small theater downstairs. We are not having much luck.
My question is this: aside from all the usual avenues–Commgate, Loopnet, HAR, reading blogs, driving around, submitting LOI’s, what other resources exist for novice commercial buyers, like us?
Is Gables Residential’s West Ave development doing so well already that plans are already in place to build the mixed-use development’s second phase? Or are the cause and credit markets so hopeless that architects of a once-hoped-for follow-on project decided they might as well post images of their design, since that’s the most exposure their work will likely ever get?
Ziegler Cooper Architects, designers of the 2727 Kirby highrise going up across the street, now have posted this image of a building on the company’s website. It’s identified it as West Ave Phase II.
And there’s this description:
THE SAD CONSEQUENCES OF SKIPPING DESSERT Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream will be shutting down its plant at 4494 Campbell Rd., off Clay Rd. in Northwest Houston, by early April: “Dori Bailey, director of consumer communications for Dreyer’s, says the company chose to close the Houston facility, which produces 20 million gallons of ice cream a year, because production demand from the Houston area has been declining over the past several years. ‘Houston was also one of our smallest plants and it only had the capability to make packaged ice cream, while our other plants are able to make other brands of ice cream snacks as well,’ Bailey says. Bailey says the company hasn’t decided whether to sell or lease the 130,000-square-foot facility. About 50,000 square feet of the plant is factory space, while 80,000 square feet is warehouse space.” [Houston Business Journal]
A major downturn in the economy tends to make it a bit easier to happen upon images of developments that have been planned in secret — though finding them can be somewhat less exciting than unearthing plans that are actually likely to happen. A tipster reports HAIF user lockmat’s discovery of two images of Brookfield Properties’ planned Five Allen Center office tower Downtown. We saw one hazy picture of this building back in June. But is there any more to it now than just a few pretty pictures?
Five Allen Center is marked “pre-development” on the Brookfield website: a 50-story, 1.2-million-sq.-ft. office tower planned for a 2.5-acre site at the northwest corner of Downtown — at the northeast corner of Houston Ave. and West Dallas. That’s a rather prominent position:
One of Swamplot’s best tipsters forwards a link to a website featuring lovely renderings of a family of glassy office buildings and blocky parking garages squatting on the former AstroWorld site — along with a rather direct question: “Is this real???”
Well, the Crosswell Torian website is a real website, where the development company proudly presents its AstroWorld tower roundup under the name SouthPointe: “a hundred+ acre, transit-oriented mixed use development.” But a brand-new 13.5-million-sq.-ft. project doesn’t exactly seem tailor-made for today’s cautious real-estate market.
If the SouthPointe design isn’t real, though, it’s a brilliant parody — down to the ultra-generic name and its not-so-silent extra vowel. It expertly answers this question: How might a bunch of suburban developers — some of them from, say, Conroe — make a complete mockery of Houston’s highest profile and best connected redevelopment site?
Hot off the Swamplot tipline: Discovery Tower, going up across McKinney St. from Discovery Green Downtown, has its first tenant — and it’ll be taking the whole building.
Beginning in late 2011 — about the time Hess’s current lease at One Allen Center expires — the 30-story tower with the wind turbines on top will be renamed Hess Tower.
After the jump, details from an email announcing the move — sent out to Hess Corporation employees late this morning:
Weingarten’s Planning Commission victory earlier this month doesn’t resolve everything for the westernmost of two replacement retail buildings now under construction at the River Oaks Shopping Center. First, reports Mary Ann Acevedo in the Houston Business Journal, that last-minute compromise left a few neighbors grumbling:
. . . some of the neighbors are not pleased that they didn’t have an opportunity to review the final agreement after Weingarten’s most recent changes prior to the Jan. 8 hearing with the Planning Commission.
According to [neighbor Janet] Moore, Weingarten had told the group it would deliver an advance copy for their review.
“They presented us a signed, unmarked copy at the hearing and had no one available authorized to negotiate changes to the agreement,†Moore says. “Some of the neighbors are disappointed with a few of the changes in the agreement.â€
On, Jan. 13, Weingarten presented the neighbors with a revised agreement that Moore says does address some of those concerns, although the parties continue to work out the details.
Next, that Vallone restaurant planned for the building’s second floor and balcony — which at one point was referred to in Weingarten’s marketing materials as Il Tavolo (and is labeled Adagio Vino in the renderings) — may not be a done deal yet:
