THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Newcomers’ Guide to Dallas/Fort Worth
The Growth Industry
By: Anne Belli Gesalman
Downtown resident Cliff Booth sometimes gets a bit lonely rollerblading in the shadows of skyscrapers. But Booth, downtown residential developer, doesn’t plan to be lonely long.
That’s because this former Canadian, president of Southwest Properties Group, has recently linked up with another firm to jointly convert five old downtown buildings into roughly 700 apartment units with a $70 million value.
If the partners’ individual track records are any indication, the projects will flourish. Booth has been quietly but profitably redeveloping buildings around Dallas and elsewhere since the 1980s. And his partner, Robert Shaw of Columbus Realty Trust, has successfully developed nearly 2,000 high-end apartments in the swank Uptown district off McKinney Avenue.
Booth says work on the old Santa Fe II Warehouse, which will be redeveloped into 208 lofts leasing for $1 per square foot, will begin this summer. Other properties involved in the deal are the historic Awalt Buildings at the entrance of the West End Historical District, 1530-1604 Main next door to Neiman Marcus and the Union Bankers complex on Elm Street on the edge of Deep Ellum.
But while the 42-year-old Booth may be known these days in real estate circles as one of the downtown residential guys, his interests have extended far beyond the confines of the Dallas central business district. Among his other acquisitions is the landmark Village on the Parkway shopping center at the intersection of the Dallas North Tollway and Belt Line Road. He also owns land near Texas Stadium and has developed apartments in McKinney.
Although his profile had risen in recent years, Booth actually is not a newcomer to Dallas. He first came here from Montreal in 1979 with plans to carry on his family’s art, antiques and real estate ventures. For a while, he owned a building next to the Hotel St. Germaine on Maple Avenue and operated a family gallery there.
He joined Southwest Properties in the early 1980s, became partner in 1984 and bought out his partner in 1987. At the time, the company was “doing a lot of smaller deals,” he says, buying little shopping centers, warehouses and some land in and around Dallas.
In 1991, Southwest got more aggressive. With funding from wealthy European friends, Booth started buying depressed properties he says none of the big pension funds and other institutional investors liked: multi-tenant, light industrial centers. Of about 10 million square feet of property Southwest acquired in the following years, nearly 8 million was this type, Booth says. Once he fixed these properties up and made them profitable, he packaged and marketed them to the big funds and investors, who now were interested.
Booth says he’s moved on to redeveloping other property types and hopes to do the same thing with them that he did with the “depressed” properties. “What we do is identify a niche maybe a little ahead of the curve and put a team together to realize a plan,” he says.
What’s next after downtown redevelopment? “I don’t know where the next niche will be or what it’s going to look like or even if it’s in Dallas,” he says. “But hopefully, we will be nimble.”
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