First Structure Ready to Rise in 700,000-SF Project

The first structure to rise will be a seven-story, 744-space parking garage, Eliot Barnett, one of three principals in the development firm, tells GlobeSt.com. The project will take 39 weeks to complete and will be positioned on the north side of Two Park Lane Place. When it's done, the door will be open to develop the balance of Park Lane Place, envisioned as a $100-million-plus neighbor to NorthPark Mall.

Harvest Partners recently acquired 17.5 acres from Raymond Nasher of Dallas to complete the land mass necessary to advance the project. Last June, Harvest Partners bought a trio of office buildings on 15.5 acres at the intersection of Park Lane and North Central Expressway. "We have all the land amassed so we can now evaluate all the different development options that we have," Barnett says of the work ahead for the partnership, which includes Tod Ruble and Blaine Lee. Part of the decision will focus on the fate of a 10-story, 450,000-sf building on the just-acquired tract. Barnet says the garage was a necessary first step to free up valuable space now used for surface parking by office tenants.

Peloton Real Estate Partners, which oversees office leasing, is in the midst of "clearing out" a 65,000-sf, four-story office building so the floors can be gutted and retooled for the repositioning, says T.D. Briggs, a Peloton partner. With the structure at 60% occupancy, he says "there are a lot of moving parts" in accomplishing the feat. It appears a 12-story, 200,000-sf office building is on the calendar to be razed to make way for retail, but a 162,427-sf structure with a 75% occupancy seems to have made the developers' cut in determining what goes and what stays in a development with a "best-guess" of retail exceeding 400,000 sf, up to 450 residential units, several office buildings and a series of parking structures.