Looks like somebody really believes in downtown Dallas: In case you missed it, and there was a mention of it Monday in The Dallas Morning News, it says here that Younan Properties, a Woodland Hills, California-based commercial real estate company, has bought the the 34-story, 26-year-old KPMG Centre on Harwood Street. The former Maxus Energy Tower near the Arts District, which had $25 million worth of rennovation done three years ago, is managed by Trammell Crow Company but owned by G.E. Asset Management, and though the Commercial Property News piece about the sale says "the price was not disclosed," the Dallas Central Appraisal District has the property valued at $62,077,800. So when Younan's chairman and CEO Zaya S. Younan tells CPN, "We've been watching the Dallas office market for a long time, and we think it's bottomed out. We're beginning to see positive absorption in the downtown market," well, you gotta hope so, because that's a lotta dough to sink in a building that has a few vacant suites available for lease in a downtown full of empty office buildings. Then again, it's not like the place isn't lacking for powerful tenants, among them JP MorganChase Bank, Odyssey Healthcare and, lookee here, the U.S. Department of Justice.
Says here that the KPMG buy makes Younan "the city's largest privately held owner of class A office properties." (Globe St.com is also reporting that the building sold for $70 million, which Younan will not confirm.) The deal, which apparently will be final in two months, gives Younan eight downtown Dallas buildings with a total of 3.5 million square feet. (KPMG provides some 900,000 of that.) Younan told GlobeSt.com that his company plans to "bring the building up to the highest standard of class AA in Downtown Dallas, [and] our goal is to achieve the first 100%-leased building in the Dallas CBD." --Robert Wilonsky
