Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Ah, nothing is too late, till the tired bulldozer shall cease to demolish.
Sign up for the Newsletter
- 7374 Brace St. [HAR]
A strip-mall enthusiast cruising the northern edge of Oak Forest this week sends a few shots from a stop through the 5405 T.C. Jester Center just south of Tidwell Rd. The center, located east across Cole Creek from the Northwest Wastewater Treatment Plant, is home to Frio To Go, part of Houston’s budding tape-the-top frozen cocktail drive-thru scene. The daquiri store has been operating since 2014 under its traffic signal sigil; the shop’s placement also provides a handy opportunity for situational testing for the over-21 students of Prime Time Driving School, located a few doors down:
GO/OF Detours
This afternoon a wall of orange and white barricades along the edge of the Heights hike & bike trail just south of I-10 is hemming in the construction equipment recently migrated onto Tarkett’s former Texas Tile Manufacturing warehouse site. Permits for some earthmoving on the former industrial side were issued just before the close of the year under the name Lower Heights District, and the Katyville property showed up on last week’s city planning commission agenda for some preliminary approvals and flood-potential scrutiny. No official word yet whether the site’s owner’s previous mention of stacked big box possibilities is still on the table.
Reader and tower scrutinizer Lucky Gutierrez also took a closer look at the oil derrick hanging around next to the site, on the edge of the bike trail:
Grading Katyville Heights
Swamplot’s sponsor today is Just Buyers Houston, which represents — yes, you guessed it — buyers only in real estate transactions. Thanks for the support!
Just Buyers Houston has a data scientist to help buyers make better decisions. But there isn’t anything the firm can do about the low inventory of homes currently for sale in many Inner Loop and surrounding neighborhoods.
Judy Thompson has been calculating market conditions every other day for more than 10 years in 19 popular local Zip Codes — using a formula based on supply and demand. It just so happens that the latest update (shown in part above; click here to see the whole thing) shows, on average across all the tracked neighborhoods, a seller’s market in every price range except the $2-million-plus market (and that one is classified as a “normal” market). The end of the year is an ending point for many listing agreements. If a lot of potential sellers re-list their houses and many others decide early 2017 is a good time to sell, that could increase inventory.
Whether that happens or not, Just Buyers Houston data scientist Henry Kernan has several analytical tools to help you understand more fully the huge investment you make when you buy a house to live in or as an investment property:
- Percentile of value for nearby or comparable properties (for example: 80 percent of lot sizes are bigger, 20 percent are smaller)
- Probability analysis of how much the final sales price will be
- Monte Carlo simulation for the return on investment (ROI) from rents, flips, long-term holding, etc.
- Needle-in-the-haystack search for exactly what any customer needs
- Spatial comparisons showing how the neighborhood or city is changing; trends
He’ll be developing even more metrics over the next few months.
So if you are an analytical buyer who has been frustrated at the dearth of house-buying data analytics, you’ll want to check in with Just Buyers Houston and see what the company has to offer. Take a look at the stats catalogued on the Just Buyers Houston website — and check it regularly as the offerings are expanded. And talk to Judy or Henry if you’re wanting a more customized approach to Houston real estate information.
Become a Swamplot sponsor and communicate directly with your next customers. Here’s how to do it.
Sponsor of the Day
The deconstruction crew that brought Meteor Lounge to the ground at Fairview and Genesee streets last week got in a last round of crushing digs at the fallen structure over the weekend, a reader reports: “They piled up all the bricks and ran over them with the huge excavator, crushing them. They then moved the debris and spread it over the dirt in the ‘parking’ lot across the street from Max’s Wine Dive.” The obliterated former club’s corner property is planned as the location of a proposed 5-story parking garage for the Fairview District redevelopment; here’s the view from Fairview of the rearranged structure itself, facing southeast toward the CenterPoint electrical substation on Genesee:
Fairview Impacts
- About 3.4M SF of New Office Space Underway in Houston with 45% Preleased, According to PMRG [HBJ]
- Columbia Property Trust Sells All Houston Office Properties for $272M [Realty News Report]
- Co-Working Space Called Headquarters To Open in Converted EaDo Warehouse in February [Houston Chronicle]
- First Model Home Goes Up in Texas City’s Lago Mar Development [Houston Chronicle]
- Montrose Property Owners File Another Lawsuit Against Montrose Management District [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Concerns About Fair Housing Mount as ‘Opportunity Index’ Tax Credit Guidelines Change [The Urban Edge]
- Long-Delayed Green Line Set To Open Wednesday with Free Rides Until Jan. 22 [Houston Chronicle]
- More Bricks Destroyed in Historic Freedmen’s Town [abc13; previously on Swamplot]
- Texas Had a Net Gain of 107,689 Residents in 2015, 4% Higher Than in 2014, Finds Texas Association of Realtors [HBJ]
- Hundreds of Stunned Turtles Recovering from Cold Weather Across Texas [Galveston County Daily News ($)]
Photo of Saturday’s freeze: Swamplot inbox
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
You can’t blame a house for leaving if you never gave it a reason to stay.
- 12202 Mills Ln. [HAR]
HOUSTON AND SAN ANTONIO COMPANIES JOIN UP IN SPROUTING TEXAS POT MARKET Meanwhile, in La Vernia: Kyle Hagerty provides an update on Houston-based aeroponics company Indoor Harvest’s plan to team up with San Antonio-based Alamo CBD in an attempt to become of the medical pot dispensing organizations the state of Texas will have to license as part of the 2015 Texas Compassionate Use Act. If all goes as planned, Indoor Harvest and Alamo will merge, then set up a 10-acre property in La Vernia, TX, to provide Vermont-based Vyripharm with pot products of specific chemical profiles — most importantly, with consistent levels of cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive pot compound being studied for potential treatment of certain cancers and forms of epilepsy. Vyripharm, in turn, is setting up research agreements with a bunch of medical institutions in Houston and Galveston.  Hagerty notes that legal pot is one of the fastest growing industries in the country — though as UH professor Gina Warren pointed out this summer, indoor pot farming is a hugely energy- and water-intensive industry, with little regulatory infrastructure in place yet to address potential local or regional impacts. [Houston BisNow]
An employee confirms to Swamplot this afternoon that the Kroger at 1990 Old Spanish Tr. will be shutting down on January 24th. The formerly 24-hour grocery store (referred to previously as Slow Jam Kroger in Jeff Balke’s 2010 Inner Loop Kroger census, though arguably having earned the nickname Bank Robbery Kroger in the years since) has already reduced its hours and is closing up at midnight these days. Readers report low morale among car-less residents of the nearby apartments; they also report a few slightly mismatched rumors that the land has been sold to a big name in the Medical Center.
- Previously on Swamplot: Kroger Says It Has ‘No Plans’ To Close Signature Store on OST; The Kroger on OST at Cambridge St. Is Closing
Photo of Kroger at 1990 Old Spanish Tr.:Â Edgar V.
Slow Jam Countdown
The long-empty land at 9330 Main St. (shown here from its Buffalo Spdwy. side) appears to be picking up a part-time job before moving on toward senior-housing-dom. A reader snapped these shots of the property’s new parking and shuttle signage, including the security camera warnings tacked to the fence. The land is right across Main St. from NRG Park, where the actual football bit of the upcoming week of Super Bowl hubbub is scheduled to go on. The sale of the land to Dallas-based Traditions Senior Living went through at the end of August.
Meanwhile, the gas station recently planted across Buffalo Spdwy. at the Durhill St. 1st Stop Food Mart appears to have sprouted, and a Valero-colored canopy is now blooming over the corner:
1st Stops near Westridge
Land Tejas’s Scottish-castle-themed Balmoral development in Humble (sketched out above) is 1 of 2 currently planned Houston-area locations for fake lake maker Crystal Lagoons’s giant outdoor pools, Candace Carlisle reports. The sand-bottomed water feature will be around 1.5 acres, and a similar 8.5-acre pool is planned for a different Land Tejas development (though the actual location of that one hasn’t yet been announced). As it does in the demo lake shown here, the lagoon company plans to keep the water in the pools much clearer than is typical of the area’s bayous and beaches (or even of the stormwater-detaining landscaping lakes typically accompanying such developments) by using a soundwave- and flocculation-based filtration system. Bacteria and algae would also be kept at swimmable levels with a set of sensor-and-Internet-controlled disinfectant injectors.
Humble Lakemakers
- Bank of America In Talks To Anchor Skanska’s Unbuilt Capitol Tower Downtown [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- NewQuest Crosswell Planning 150K-SF Retail Center in Kingwood [Realty News Report]
- ‘The Downturn Seems To Be Over,’ Says Texas A&M University Real Estate Center Chief Economist [HBJ]
- Houston Fails To Make List of Top U.S. Cities for Foreign Investors — Again [Houston Chronicle]
- How Revitalization Programs Slowly Impact Houston Neighborhoods [Housing of Houston]
- California-Based Juice Bar Chain Juice It Up! Looking To Expand in Houston [Houston Chronicle]
- A Look at Temporary 3-Story Super Bowl Venue Club Nomadic So Far [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Houston’s 8 Greatest Vantage Points for Dramatic Downtown Skyline Views [Houstonia; previously on Swamplot]
Photo of the San Jacinto Monument:Â Swamplot inbox
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Eventually you will come to understand that demolition heals everything, and demolition is all there is.
