Omni Hotels Owner Buys Green-Glass Office Tower In Dallas Arts District
A prominent Dallas Arts District office tower was picked up by an affiliate of a local investment firm that also owns the luxury Omni Hotels & Resorts chain.
The TRT Holdings affiliate purchased the 275K SF St. Paul Place office tower from Pacific Elm Properties for an undisclosed amount, the Dallas Morning News reported. The green-glass office tower at 750 N. Saint Paul St. was valued at more than $47M by the Dallas Central Appraisal District this year.
Dallas-based TRT Holdings was founded by billionaire Robert Rowling and his father, Reese Rowling. In addition to Omni Hotels & Resorts, TRT Holdings’ portfolio includes mixed-use, office and residential properties across the country.
The company did not immediately respond to Bisnow's request for comment on the deal, which closed Dec. 2.
However, in a statement sent to Bisnow, a spokesperson for Pacific Elm said the company decided to sell St. Paul Place after determining “the project was no longer a strategic priority.” Pacific Elm worked with Newmark to run a competitive process, and TRT Holdings was the highest bidder.
The 22-story office tower, built in 1983, features the logo of its largest tenant, D Magazine, near its precipice. CoStar Group and Mayer LLP are also tenants of the building.
St. Paul Place had more than 23K SF available for sublease at the time of the deal, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Months of renovations were done to the building this year after it was damaged by a flood in April.
Pacific Elm purchased St. Paul Place from Dallas-based Quadrant Investment Properties in 2023. The transaction was financed with a $66.7M loan from MetLife Commercial Mortgage.
Before selling the property to Pacific Elm, Quadrant Investment completed a multimillion-dollar renovation during its seven years of ownership.
Outside of this deal and Crescent Real Estate's purchase of the Texas Capital Center in Uptown, many of the latest Dallas-Fort Worth office transactions have been for Class-B properties.
Fort Worth-based Lone Cypress Realty acquired the 118K SF office building at 15301 Spectrum Blvd. in Addison from DRA Advisors as part of an off-market transaction earlier this month. And Urban Infraconstruction bought the nearly 54K SF Midway Office Park at 14665 Midway Road in Addison last month.
However, DFW's growing financial services sector is driving momentum in the region's office market.
Wells Fargo opened a new $570M office campus in the Las Colinas neighborhood of Irving in October, and the financial services sector has been responsible for around half of the top 10 office leases in the metro over the past two quarters.
Asking rents in Dallas submarkets like Preston Center, Uptown and along the LBJ Freeway corridor near the Galleria have skyrocketed, and they aren’t expected to come back to earth for at least two years.
