Category: News

With most properties taking roughly two years between breaking ground and occupancy, the construction pipeline takes time to shift from changing market conditions.  Still, I think it is informative to see how the various property types have changed over the past few years, along with some data on the current under construction pipeline.

As you can see in the chart below, the industrial market seems almost unfazed by the current recession, with almost 30 million square feet of space currently under construction (note this does not include flex properties).  

Office and retail properties are show parallel trend lines of peaking in 2016 and trending downward since (The current office pipeline is 7.1 million square feet, while the retail pipeline is 3.3 million square feet).  

With recent announcements for the office sector though (Cawley is kicking off The Parkwood, a 120,000-square foot office building in Far North Dallas.  First United Mortgage Corp. will occupy about half of the property and 

Harwood announced Harwood 14 in Uptown.  Harwood 14 is a 27 story, 360,000-square foot office project.   Haynes and Boone will be the lead tenant and will occupy about 125,000 square feet).

Of the projects currently under way for office and retail, roughly half of the square footage has been pre-leased (54% and 52%, respectively), so the market is scheduled to have over 5 million square foot of new vacant office and retail space delivered over the next two years (3.6 million square feet for office and 1.7 million square feet for retail).

By Taylor Tompkins  – Data Reporter, Dallas Business Journal

May 31, 2020, 6:05pm EDT

Managing partners Kathy Permenter and Moody Younger have been spending a lot of time on the phone since the beginning of the pandemic.

Once closures began, the pair in charge of Younger Partners began checking on employees and clients. Phone calls ran the gamut — checking on families, comparing notes on what others were hearing in the market and understanding the long-lasting impacts of the shut downs caused by the outbreak.

“Everything that we were working on all the sudden changed,” Younger said.

Uncertainty around construction and moving offices caused a number of the boutique commercial real estate firm’s deals to stall.

“We had several deals that I think had this not occurred, (we) would have made different choices and would have proceeded in different ways,” Permenter said. “I think deals that were in the signature stage — some of those some of those didn’t even go through.”

Younger Partners weren’t the only ones seeing a hesitation to buy or lease space. Dallas-Fort Worth experienced negative net office absorption for the first time in more than two years during the first quarter of 2020.

By the end of April, though, Younger Partners was starting to see movement again in the market.

“Life is coming back into (the market) a little bit,” Younger said in late April. “People are engaging more and over the next month you’ll definitely see people start to stick their toe in the water.”

Industrial transactions for Younger Partners remained steady through the bulk of the COVID-19 interruption. A slowdown in its land business was caused by planning and zoning delays on the local government level, Younger said.

The company also has hopes that the outbreak will create high demand for its leasing services throughout the summer.

“There have been multiple office buildings that haven’t performed as the investors originally anticipated,” Younger said. “Now with what’s happened with COVID-19, they’ve just really been put on hold, and so they still haven’t performed. And so, I think, they’re looking for companies that are creative and energetic to take over.”

The firm expects most of revenue that it had anticipated in the spring and early summer months will be pushed back to the third quarter.

“Especially in Dallas, (real estate firms) really kind of design yourself around recessions so that you can make it through them,” Younger said. “This is a different cause, but it’s really a recession. In our business, revenue isn’t consistent, and it bumps along so you have to keep more capital on hand just for those times when there is a recession and you have to manage a company with limited revenue.”

This story is part of a national series from the Business Journals’ 44 newsrooms across the country. Click here to read all 247 stories. The Younger Partners article can be seen here.

Younger Partners Managing Principal Capital Markets Scot Farber is knocking an item off of his bucket list this June when he climbs Mount Kilimanjaro. He’s partnering with the Make-A-Wish Foundation of North Texas to help raise money for critically ill children to be granted wishes. He wants to raise $1 for every one of the 19,341 feet he will climb to reach the summit. We’re asking for your support. You can contribute by donating here.

March 30, 2020 Kerri Panchuk, Bisnow Dallas-Fort Worth

All the intangibles revealed during commercial property tours, like a building’s patina or its interior design, or how it just feels to walk into the lobby, help landlords win over potential tenants.

But what happens when an international pandemic like the coronavirus makes it impossible for brokers to invite prospective tenants and clients on-site for personalized tours?  For some, it means business activity subsides until the crisis ends. 

Others are sealing the deal from the comfort of their own homes. While virtual reality and remote building tours aren’t new to the brokerage industry, the pandemic may hasten their move into must-haves.

Sergey Zolkin/Unsplash Texas-based landlord Boxer Property decided to go full-throttle into the virtual realty space when the COVID-19 pandemic forced potential tenants away from the company’s office buildings. 

Boxer had already deployed virtual reality tech tools that allow tenants to capture realistic, multidimensional views of its properties online. 

“Years ago, we started taking pictures of suites, and then we started doing videos,” Boxer Properties Marketing Director Heather Shuttleworth said. “Then, we recently got a Matterport camera, and we are doing the full 360-virtual tour experience at several of our properties.”

Even though 3D tours are effective, Boxer still wanted a more personalized approach during the COVID-19 crisis, so the firm upped the ante and now offers live Skype property tours hosted by Boxer employees.  “They can talk to [the leasing agent] face to face and see the space through the camera,” Shuttleworth said. “If they want to walk through it on their computer they can, but we are kind of missing the personal touch there and people often have questions and want to look at something more closely in the space.”

The Boxer team is already receiving positive feedback; and at least one Skype tour recipient signed up for a lease right after taking a remote interactive tour. Unsplash/Kentaro Toma Co-living and microstudio multifamily provider Common says 30% of its rental applications come from the firm’s online virtual tour experience, which the firm has operated in some form since its inception five years ago.

But Vice President of Operations Eric Rodriguez said Common, much like Boxer Property, kicked its existing remote solutions up a notch when the coronavirus crisis sent New York and other areas into lockdown mode.  With the firm already offering FaceTime and Google Hangout tours with live specialists prior to the crisis, the transition to conducting everything remotely was an easy one. 

“It has always been part of our concept,” Rodriguez said of the firm’s tech-first approach.  Rodriguez said Common has always believed its mission is to get more people inside the property at all times of the day. In good times, that involves both in-person tours and VR-guided tours. In bad times like these, it means doing everything remotely without missing a beat.  

The firm believes all multifamily leasing in the future will depend heavily on remote access and virtual reality components to stay competitive. 

“Generally the property management industry is shifting toward that convenience-first perspective,” he said.  Real estate brokerage Younger Partners out of Dallas has been offering virtual tours of its Greenway Tower listing in Irving, Texas, for quite some time. The brokerage doesn’t view remote-viewing or virtual tours as new concepts, nor do they see their emergence as related to COVID-19. 

“I think it’s becoming more and more a must-have,” founding principal Sean Dalton said. “Everything is changing in our society as far as [everyone] wanting things now and quicker. Everyone wants things to get done faster … and I think these virtual tours allow people to be more efficient with their time.” Greenway Tower’s owner poured millions of dollars into renovating the property, and the virtual tours were put into place with the help of an app to simply get more eyes on the building and all its improvements, Dalton told Bisnow.   This is exactly where virtual technology succeeds best.  “We felt that this was an opportunity to really get the building into [prospective tenants’] hands rather than pulling them out to Las Colinas.”

Here’s a link to the virtual tours available at Greenway Tower.

You can find the Bisnow article here.