WILL SKANSKA KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSTON CLUB? 
A source tells Nancy Sarnoff that Swedish construction firm Skanska, which has the Houston Club Building at 811 Rusk under contract, may tear down the 1948 downtown building and build an office tower in its place. A couple of clues: the closing of the building’s ground-floor Hunan Downtown restaurant and the “Closed for Cleaning” sign posted in the window of the Travis St. Burger King. The Houston Club’s lease on 4 floors of the 18-floor building doesn’t expire for another 4 years, though. The building’s previous owner, a limited partnership controlled by Cameron Management, gave up the property to its lender last September after declaring bankruptcy a few months earlier. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Silberman Properties
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Tag: Buying and Selling
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE VIRGINIANS ARE COMING! ” . . . the article doesn’t say they are not moving people from other areas of the country. It says they have not decided. I have personally seen internal memos that tell their employees they are consolidating Houston campuses before they consider moving other offices around the country to this campus and that it would be 2015 before that would happen. I don’t think it is a stretch to read into this that they will be moving other areas of the country to this campus. As a Realtor I can tell you that people from their Fairfax campus have already begun buying homes in The Woodlands … somebody is pretty confident of being moved if they are doing that. I’m guessing they’re trying to avoid employees in those areas leaving (rather than move) before XOM is ready for them to.” [David Hageman, commenting on Welcome to the Land of ExxonMobil: A Tour of the Company’s New North Houston Campus]
MIDRISE APARTMENTS, BEHIND THE WATERWALL The developers behind the flopped Turnberry Tower Houston gave up on plans for their Uptown 34-story plumber-friendly luxury condo project 3 years ago, but waited until last month to sell off the 3-acre site at the corner of Hidalgo and McCue, between the Waterwall Park and the Galleria. The new owner, Hines, says it plans to start construction early next year on 300 units in a 6-to-8-story apartment complex there. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE TRENDSETTING LESS FORTUNATE “I have a few friends moving to Houston who are going to live in the ’burbs – not because they’re into racial purity and strip malls but because that’s where they can actually afford to buy a home. The less fashionable an area becomes, the more affordable it is to people of modest means, which typically means the sneerers look a bit snobbish. Which suddenly turns the formerly unfashionable area fashionable (I believe the vogue term right now is “authenticâ€), and the sneering and budgeting just reverses itself. Laughing at the people who have tight budgets but aren’t poor enough to actually be considered poor is an old means to paint a veneer onto one’s classism, and it’s often couched in the argument over whether surbubanites or midtowners are morally and culturally superior. It’s utterly ridiculous, but it’ll never stop.” [Sihaya, commenting on ExxonMobil Fesses Up to Its Employees About That New North Houston Campus It’s Been Building]
HEIGHTS-AREA RECYCLING CENTER GOING TO THE CLEANERS 
Up for a vote in this morning’s city council meeting: The sale of the First Ward recycling center at 3602 Center St. to the owners of a neighboring property for $2.01 million. Under the agreement, the city would lease back the 1-acre lot near the corner of Washington Ave. and Heights Blvd. for 18 months from Admiral Linen Service — for free. A plan to set up a new area recycling facility on Spring St. was halted 2 years ago. Update, 1:20 pm: Voting on the issue has been postponed until next week. [Houston Politics; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Alexander W.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HE-MAN, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO SAVE THESE TURRETS! “This house will more than likely be torn down. It’s a shame, really, because it’s one of the most unique structures in town, but the list of people who, a) could afford the $300K price tag, and b) would want to live in a house that looks like Castle Grayskull, is probably pretty short.” [Stormy Blanco, commenting on Wichita St. Mystery House Goes on the Market Today: Your First Peek Inside]
After the Orange Show, the Beer Can House, and the Third Ward home of the Flower Man, probably no Houston home has accumulated more outsider-art street cred than Charles Fondow’s decades-long transformation of a former Riverside Terrace daycare center into a bubbling stew of half-timbered gables, turrets, and towering rooftop decks. The ongoing Wichita St. skyward expansion project had an air of mystery, too. In Jennifer Mathieu’s 2001 Houston Press profile, Fondow comes across as shy and self-effacing, though he had by then spent $300,000 and countless hours of hard work on his grand, mostly-DIY creation, inspired by visions he had collected from visits to exotic far-away lands like Russia and Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Fondow, who loved to travel, passed away in March after falling ill on a Caribbean cruise. His gotta-keep-adding home-improvement project had lasted 31 years. And earlier today, a for-sale sign went up on the property. The listing features a first public viewing of what everybody wants to see: the building’s innards. Could this place be just as weird and wonderful inside as what Fondow carefully assembled outside and on top?
Oily 3-time Survivor loser Russell Hantz (pictured above in the shark-wrestling competition from Survivor: Samoa) tells Entertainment Weekly he’s come to town “to bring Houston’s economy back on its feet.” How’s he gonna get the market back from its tippy-toes? By flipping houses — then bragging about it on-camera. Apparently, a gig like that pays pretty well.
Hantz’s reputation as a tell-’em-straight kinda guy was sealed in January when the Daily Beast revealed him as the mysterious source of persistent leaks about the reality show’s top-secret storylines. In his contracts, Hantz had agreed to pay “liquidated damages” of $5 million if he revealed which contestants had been eliminated before episode air dates. CBS responded to the breach by suing the message-board commenter who posted the tips — and featuring Hantz in Survivor: Redemption Island, which began airing in February. (The suit against Survivor Sucks website poster Jim Early was dismissed.)
DECODING THE CODE BUILDING SALE 
City council today approved the sale of Houston’s code enforcement building at 3300 Main St. to the Midtown Redevelopment Authority, for $5 million. The 57,899 sq.-ft. structure and parking garage on a full Midtown block, which also houses the city’s Green Building Resource Center, received several sealed private-sector bids before the February 17th due date. Last week, Mayor Parker declared that the Midtown TIRZ had submitted the high bid, but 2 council members disputed that, claiming the group hadn’t submitted a bid for the property at all. (One of them, Anne Clutterbuck, was the lone dissenter in today’s vote.) Chronicle reporter Chris Moran hasn’t been able to get a straight answer yet, but interprets a staff report to mean that the TIRZ did not submit a formal bid — the city simply determined a purchase from the government entity would be “the most advantageous.” What’s all the fuss? “The city built the sale of 3300 Main into its FY 11 budget, and it is now depending on that sale to help it bridge a $21 million projected budget shortfall for the fiscal year that ends June 30. There is still no information on what the Authority might do with the property, which remains off the tax rolls as long as it is owned by a public entity.” [Houston Politics]
GULF FREEWAY OUTLET MALL SITE: UP FOR GRABS? 
A possible complication in those plans to put a new 95-store outlet mall between the Big League Dreams sports complex and the Bay Colony shopping center west of the Gulf Freeway in League City: The Galveston County Daily News‘s Laura Elder reports that the 35 acres of land Tanger Factory Outlet Centers was hoping to purchase out of bankruptcy for $8.7 million will be going up for auction instead in just 10 days. A bankruptcy court ordered the sale last week. Tanger announced the project in January, just days after the Simon Property Group announced its plans to build another outlet center, the 100-store Galveston Premium Outlets, just 4 miles to the south, in Texas City. [Laura Elder’s Buzz Blog; previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Tanger Outlets
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE $1 MILLION PROBLEM WITH RIVER OAKS MID-CENTURY MODERNS “River Oaks MCMs *always* go for lot value and get torn down. Sentimental owners think they should get a premium for the good architecture but it never happens. If they really care about the building they should price it at 900k and put a no teardown easement on it. Instead, they will lower the price by 100k every 3 months and 3 years from now it will be a Tuscan villa. (As a point of comparison, 59 Tiel Way, a Kamrath beauty which had a much larger, insanely off the hook lot, bigger, nicer, renovated house, was similarly priced – for 3 years he lowered the price slowly, and eventually was offering it on Ebay for 950 minus commission. No one bit and now, sadly, it is a clay lot that will likely sell in the mid 800s). Another comparitor is the MCM on North BLvd, also priced like this, slowly reduced for 3 years, now at 899k until the listing expired again. People like to admire MCM architecture but they don’t like to pay $1M for it. In Houston, at least.” [CAHBF, commenting on 1960 Preserved: River Oaks Mod Box Jumps into the Market]
BLIND ITEM: “POPULAR PUB INSIDE LOOP” FOR SALE — GUESS WHICH Your clues: “This very popular pub boasts great reviews, has been in business for 16 years and is a big hit with the neighborhood crowd as a place for local residents to gather and enjoy adult beverages in a relaxing atmosphere. It is one of the very few places in Houston that has a bocce court (lawn bowling). . . . The median age of their clientele is probably 30-35 and they enjoy playing bocce in their spacious beer garden, watching the world go by from their sidewalk [cafe], relaxing indoors in air conditioned comfort, watching their favorite sports on any of their indoor / outdoor televisions, playing a game of darts, enjoying their favorite music from the internet jukebox or taking advantage of the free Wi/Fi. They are well known for their great beer/wine selection and friendly service.” [BizBuySell, via Twitter user ucalledthewolf]
A buyer has at last been found for the carefully constructed Forbidden City exhibit at the shuttered Forbidden Gardens attraction in Katy. Well . . . for a portion of it, at least. Ben Cornblath is director of the museum and cultural center that closed under mysterious circumstances in February, then held an open-to-the-public selloff of many of its holdings. He tells Swamplot that a group of people in an “environmental” company associated with the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo has expressed interest in . . . that big shed that’s been standing over the model and protecting it from things like sleet, Hurricane Ike, and the Houston sun. The park is still awaiting the company’s bid. Cornblath says such structures appear to be a rare commodity around the metropolitan area, and this one has a strong track record of sheltering an entire miniature Middle Kingdom city for nearly a decade and a half. But getting the steel structure out of there won’t be easy: The move may require a crane.
What about that thing beneath the sought-after roof, the one-twentieth-scale model of Beijing’s Forbidden City?
If, when the place was up for sale last year, you only liked what you saw of the legendary ornate sorta-replica French palace in Sherwood Forest that Houston strip-mall king and car collector Jerry J. Moore pieced together for himself from actual French parts, you’ll absolutely love the home in its latest incarnation: The 12,734-sq.-ft. interior has now been gutted completely. And, the home’s current owners hope, you’ll be willing to pay about $5.15 million more for it in its current condition than they were when they bought it about this time last year for just $3.75 million — you know, when the interior had things in it like floors and walls and ceilings, not to mention functioning electricity and plumbing. Also swept away by demolition crews for today’s more sophisticated, imaginative, and demanding buyer — Moore’s famous 26-car garage at the back of the property, with the “treehouse” quarters above it, as well as the poolhouse. Listing agent Diane Kingshill of Martha Turner Properties tells Swamplot both of those structures were in poor condition and had mold.
But if any mold was also hiding in the marble flooring, chandeliers, or extensive wood paneling of the main house, it’s clearly gone now. All that sweat equity put in by the current owners has many more benefits — certainly enough to justify the $8.9 million asking price with which the home has returned to this year’s much stronger market. Just see what interior vistas have been opened up, in a home once full of visual obstacles:
The longtime owners of the now-shuttered original Otto’s Bar B Que and Hamburgers on Memorial Dr. filed suit on Tuesday against their former broker, Cushman & Wakefield executive director David Cook, claiming that he failed to let them know about several offers to buy their property. As a result, the lawsuit claims, the owners ended up selling their real-estate holdings for — and settling into retirement with — only a third of the money they might have otherwise received. Marcus and June Sofka originally listed their restaurant at 5502 Memorial Dr. and some adjacent property with Cook in August 2007. Two months later, according to the suit, the Ponderosa Land Development Co. submitted a written offer for the land to Cook for $105 a sq. ft. But the Sofkas claim they didn’t hear about that offer until much later. Why wouldn’t Cook have given them such good news?
