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.
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 
“Update on this corner: 
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 
Residents of the Museum Gardens Apartments at 1123 Bartlett St. received notices taped to their front doors this week announcing that both the ownership and management of the 28-unit courtyard-style ensemble a couple blocks northwest of the Contemporary Arts Museum has changed. Contact info for the new owner matches that of real estate, construction and development, homebuilding, REIT, and mortgage firm Jetall Companies. A reader wants to know if Jetall might actually manage apartment complexes too — and asks “Is this lovely old complex a goner?” Photo: 
