DALLAS MORNING NEWS
By: Steve Brown
Westmount Realty Capital sells 5 downtown Dallas buildings
A longtime downtown Dallas investor has sold five buildings on Commerce and Main streets.
Westmount Realty Capital sold the retail and office buildings to the investors who developed the new Joule Hotel on Main Street, the owners of Headington Oil Co. of Dallas.
Westmount had owned the real estate for more than a decade.
“We started buying these particular properties in 1995,” Westmount CEO Cliff Booth said Tuesday. “We once had plans to do quite a large project there.
“But with the economy where it is, it would definitely have been in the next cycle.”
So Westmount sold the properties instead. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the buildings are valued for taxes at more than $2 million.
The sale is one of the largest recent transfers of real estate in downtown’s old financial district. Four of the buildings are in the 1400 and 1500 blocks of Commerce.
The largest of the properties is the eight-story, 50,000-square-foot 1604 Main St. building, which Westmount acquired from Neiman Marcus in 1996.
The office and retail building started in 1912 as the Sumpter Building – built by prominent Dallas financier and real estate tycoon Guy Sumpter. It later housed the Central State Bank.
Booth said that when his property investment firm began buying downtown real estate in the early 1990s, not much was happening in the central business district.
“We felt like that was the block to buy [along Main and Commerce] because Neiman’s was there,” he said. “If something was going to happen downtown with all those beautiful old buildings, at some point it would happen there.”
Westmount began parting with the mostly vacant buildings in 2003 when it sold the building that houses the Joule.
Oilman Tim Headington owns the 129-room boutique hotel, which opened last summer.
Headington Oil chief financial officer Michael Tregoning said there are no specific plans, but the new owners hope to redevelop the buildings.
“We feel very strongly about the prospects for downtown Dallas,” Tregoning said. “We have a big investment already.”
With these sales, Westmount Realty has sold the majority of its holdings in the Dallas area. In recent months, the real estate firm found buyers for land it owned along North Central Expressway and an office complex in Las Colinas.
The developer also sold the last of the units in its SoCo Urban Lofts building on Jackson Street.
“We haven’t done a new deal in a while, but we are ready to invest when the right things come along,” Booth said.
View All