April 2010

Downtown Building goes back to lender.

April 22, 2010

Nancy Sarnoff: Houston Chronicle

http://blogs.chron.com/primeproperty/2010/04/downtown_building_goes_back_to_1.html

Downtown building goes back to lender

 

919 Milam

 

Downtown’s 919 Milam office building has gone back to its lender through a deed in lieu of foreclosure.

Chicago-based Transwestern Investment Co. bought the 723,000-square-foot building from Hines in 2007 for slightly more than $100 million, sources familiar with the deal said at the time.

The document cites a $97 million loan agreement dated September 26, 2007 with National City Bank, which was merged into PNC Bank.

Neither Transwestern’s Matthew Haley nor Fred Solomon, a spokesman for PNC, would comment.

An interesting rumor associated with this building is that Mexican billionaire — and richest person in the world — Carlos Slim may be interested in buying the note from the lender.

“We’re always looking at the possibility of buying properties,” Arturo Elías Ayub, spokesman for Carlos Slim, said recently. “For the moment, we haven’t bought anything.”

Meanwhile, a Galleria-area office building is also in distress.

It’s not in foreclosure, but “we do have problems with our lender,” Wells Fargo, said Dougal Cameron of Cameron Management, owner of the 350,000-square-foot 2000 St. James Place.

Indeed, Cameron put the property into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year, listing assets and liabilities of between $10,000,001 and $50 million.

Cameron Management bought the building from Coca Cola at the end of 2007 knowing that the tenant, Minute Maid, would be moving out a couple years later.

The company had the building LEED certified, but hasn’t been able to find a tenant.

“I’m still hopeful,” Cameron said. “We’ve got some things working, but it’s an empty building.”

Houston Dynamo Select “EaDo” site for new stadium.

The east end of downtown Houston was finally selected for the new Dynamo stadium. It seems that this deal bounced around like a ping-pong ball between Pearland and the Greenway Plaza area before finally ending up downtown. Here is a link from biznow.com that has some interesting information regarding the new sports stadium complex to be completed the first quarter of 2012.

http://www.bisnow.com/houston_commercial_real_estate_news_story.php?p=7976

419 Van Molen. Reduced from $650,000. to $495,000.