ARE THERE 2 STARBUCKS NEARBY? California chef Bradley Ogden spent 2 days investigating 16 different restaurant locations in Houston recently. And he now has signed letters of intent for leases on 3 of them: One near the future site of ExxonMobil’s corporate campus south of The Woodlands, and the other 2 “across the street from each other five minutes from River Oaks.” Ogden says they’ll be “branded, quick, casual, farm-to-table restaurants. The Bradley Ogden restaurant inside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is shutting down next month. [Eater Vegas]
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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]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: AND LIVING THERE WOULD DRIVE ME HALF OUT OF MY MIND “I pity the homeowner who has to enter ‘1513 1/2 E. 32nd 1/2 St.’ into any online form where they try to verify an address, or, god forbid, describe it to someone over the phone.” [j, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: Double Barbecue Toast]
HARK, A FENCE! 
Six years ago the Aga Khan Foundation purchased and demolished the Robinson Warehouse at the corner of Allen Parkway and Montrose Blvd., announcing plans to build a new Ismaili Cultural Center in its place on the often soggy 11-acre site. With the exception of the appearance last year of a construction trailer for the assembly of the Rosemont Bridge over Buffalo Bayou across the street, though, there’d been no action there since. Until this week, that is, as several readers have reported: Fence posts are going up around the lot, from Allen Parkway all the way back to and along West Dallas. “I am wondering if this is actually a sign of construction on the center or if they are just tired of people parking/running dogs on the property,” writes one correspondent. “I will be on the look out for Port-A-Cans.” Photo: Swamplot inbox
FAIR WARNING: ABOUT TO MESS WITH ALABAMA THEATER MARQUEE 
Publicists for Weingarten Realty want Swamplot readers to know that workers about to poke into the underside of the Alabama Theater marquee aren’t dismantling it. They’ll only be replacing the lights there with new LED fixtures. Doing that will require removing the soffit panels below the Shepherd-facing sign on the soon-to-be first Houston-proper Trader Joe’s. “The marquee will look just as it does today with the only exception being new energy efficient lighting on the underside,” the shopping-center owner tells Swamplot. The work should take about 2 weeks. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Weingarten Realty
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SCRAPES OFF A LITTLE EASIER THOUGH “Wallpaper is to houses what tattoos are to people. When you get it, you think that it looks great and cannot wait to show your friends. Twenty to thirty years later, you cannot look at it without going ‘ughhh’ and shuddering to yourself.” [Old School, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Kitchen Sampler]
THE WOODLANDS LANDING HUGE NEW PEDESTRIAN COMPLEX 
The Woodlands’ next big mixed-use development will be named after famous aviator, philanthropist, and recluse Howard Hughes. Hughes Landing will sit at the upper east end of Lake Woodlands, west of The Woodlands Mall and north of the East Shore neighborhood. Its 66 acres will eventually be covered with 8 office buildings, a boutique hotel, shops and entertainment venues, and apartments. Plus: a boardwalk and pier jutting into the lake. First to go up in the new development will be another one of those Gensler-designed office buildings, One Hughes Landing, shown above. Construction on it starts this fall; the building is expected to be finished by the end of next year. [Business Wire]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT SPRINGWOODS VILLAGE HOTELS WILL HAVE GOING FOR THEM “these hotels will kill it. even WITHOUT the exxon HQ there, hotels in the Woodlands area are underserved, try finding a room on a weekend night @ the pavilion. it’s about $150 to stay @ marriott/hilton/nothing special spots. and you must stay there, or be that guy with a real job who drives 30 miles drunk from the Jimmy Buffett concert. they will have that rarified air of both business travel monday-friday + just about any weekend packed. it won’t be anything architecturally or intellectually inspired, but it will be a runaway success.” [HTX Rez, commenting on Closest Hotel to ExxonMobil, from Scratch]
CLOSEST HOTEL TO EXXONMOBIL, FROM SCRATCH 
Has it been your lifelong dream to develop a quaint little hotel in the town center of a brand-new 1,800-acre “eco-themed” community in the shadows of the formerly woodsy new suburban-style corporate campus of the world’s largest oil company world’s largest publicly traded oil company? All righty, then: Now’s your chance! CDC Houston announced today that it’s looking for proposals from would-be developers of the very first hotel in Springwoods Village, on a site “in walking or shuttle distance” of ExxonMobil’s humongous new office hub, currently under construction just west of where I-45 spits out the Hardy Toll Rd. The Houston subsidiary of New York real estate firm Coventry Development Corp. plans to reach a total of 1,400 hotel rooms in Springwoods Village eventually. [Previously on Swamplot] Map: Springwoods Village
COMMENT OF THE DAY: SELL THE STREET, SLOW THE TRAFFIC “Agreed that we need more “super blocks†about as much as an aneurysm. Why is the Galleria area traffic such a cluster? Because they took the streets out. Why does downtown usually flow pretty well? Because they left the streets in, in a nice neat grid pattern that is only confusing if you try to get too hung up on true north, south, east, and west.” [mollusk, commenting on Finger Minute Maid Apartments To Hang Low, Cut Off Leftfield Block]
CHUY’S ENCHILADAS TO DEVOUR, SHARE 
For $10.49 plus tax and tip, you could order the Elvis Presley Memorial Combo at one of the 7 Houston-area Chuy’s. Or for $11 to $13, you could buy a share of the restaurant’s stock at its impending IPO (if you can get in, of course). The regional Mexican-restaurant chain, which was bought in 2006 by a New York private-equity firm, grew from 8 locations in 2007 to 32 this year. The company plans to use the $75 million it hopes to raise in the offering to pay off debts, terminate an agreement with an advisory group, and open more than 50 additional locations over the next 4 years. [TM Daily Post] Photo of Chuy’s at 9350 Westheimer: Happy Family Travels
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT THEY’RE PLANNING TO BUILD IN HOUSTON “I always have to chuckle when people are discussing what is being built somewhere in town. ‘Why don’t THEY build . . .’ or ‘Why don’t THEY put in . . .’ There really is no ‘THEY’ sitting back and ‘planning’ what to put in. When property is up for sale, there are numerous buyers out there who already have their OWN project (whatever it is they do) looking for a place at a price they are willing to pay, and usually in a certain part of town. If it’s a medical group, ‘they’ are not going to say ‘Hey, this neighborhood needs a restaurant’ — unless of course they decide to put one inside the medical building they build. But you get my point. These are not planned communities with someone (called ‘They’) at the helm, making decisions. As long as the citizens let the rich ‘good-ole-boys’ swing the vote every time ‘ZONING’ comes up, people can generally build what they want — where they want in Houston, TX.” [Mr-DJ, commenting on Clearing an Empty Lot in the Museum District]
FILLING COMMERCIAL SPACE BY THE SQUARE FOOT 
A new website launched by a Houston startup aims to simplify the complicated process of leasing and setting up shop in a new office, warehouse, restaurant, or retail space. Kicked off this month with about 1,500 Houston property listings from about a dozen local and national brokers, The Square Foot is targeted at small and medium businesses that have never leased commercial property before. After steering customers to properties that match their criteria, the site intends to smooth out the process of finding helping tenants find furniture, IT services, movers, and related services as well. Co-founder Justin Lee tells Swamplot the site is focusing on Houston for now, but hopes to expand coverage to Texas’s other major cities by the end of the year.
PUSHING BEYOND “PAWS ON THE PATIO” 
Heights, Midtown, and Washington Ave burger joint Christian’s Tailgate serves dogs too! Pictured at right is a meal of hamburger, fries, a donut, and “doggie beer” from the local chain’s “Mutt Menu” of “gourmet dog treats.” [Christian’s Tailgate Bar & Grill, via b4-u-eat; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Christian’s Tailgate
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]
