Graystone Center's New Ad: $1 Per SF Signing Bonus

The offer is coming from John Bowles Co. camp, which won a heated race for the leasing assignment after Peloton Real Estate Partners resigned from the One Graystone Center job. Lincoln Property Co. is continuing to manage the asset at 3010 LBJ Freeway, bought in May 2003 with a 60% occupancy by Younan Properties Inc.

"We felt there was probably another leasing company in the marketplace that would be a better fit with their ownership style," Joel Pustmueller, a Peloton partner, tells GlobeSt.com about the resignation.

In the past month, the locally based John Bowles Co. has picked up leasing duties for 686,867 sf in 10 buildings in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, but Graystone is the "crown jewel" of the pack in class and size. It also carries one of the higher vacancies, 58.5%. The 14-broker shop was up against industry giants for the assignment, but was able to leverage the play with Deborah Boles, who came on board earlier this year after her former employer and Graystone's one-time owner, the Canadian-based Kolter Corp., sold all that it had in Dallas.

The new assignment comes just two months after the John Bowles team got the nod from Moses Libitzky of Dallas to lease his Kolter purchases, the nearby 162,346-sf Meadows Building at 5646 Milton St. and 62,492-sf Alpha Building at 5339 Alpha Rd. John Bowles tells GlobeSt.com that Boles' sole focus will be the trio of one-time Kolter buildings for the two owners.

"Debbie being on our team at that point certainly was the driving factor in our picking up that (Graystone) building," Bowles says. "The thing I am most proud of is we went up against some large companies."

Bowles says the $1 per sf bonus is only being offered at the 15-story Graystone, where the largest contiguous block of class A space is 35,000 sf in a structure with 22,057-sf floor plates. The team is quoting $17 per sf. Based on brokers' rule of thumb, the bonus would add 10% to 20%, depending upon term, to the $3 per sf to $5 per sf commission usually gleaned from a five-year lease at $16 per sf.

"We want to see every deal," stresses Ed Pachecano, marketing representative for the John Bowles Co.

Bowles says the firm's historical 95% occupancy at properties not only helped win Graystone, but also meant that the portfolio needed to be refueled so his straight-commission brokers had plenty of product to show. "We like to think of ourselves as a group of guys who lease space and not just go after listings," he says of back-to-back catches, crisscrossing the metroplex, that took the portfolio to eight million sf in 120 office and retail properties in the metroplex.