Hillwood Pipeline Ready for Vertical Push

That's word from Ross Perot Jr., the featured speaker at yesterday's NAIOP breakfast that attracted more than 200 office and industrial brokers to the Dallas Country Club for a first-hand review of the Hillwood pipeline. Industrial ears were tuned into the 800,000 sf that will break ground in 60 to 90 days in Alliance. The attention-grabber, though, was talk about a series of starts to go vertical at Victory with 225 rental units in two residential blocks, 110,000 sf in two mixed-use buildings and a 300,000-sf office building.

The apartments will break ground in the summer and the mixed-use buildings in the third or fourth quarter. The 300,000-sf office building will be ready to advance when pre-leasing hits a 50% benchmark which, Perot tells GlobeSt.com, will be in the summer. He says it too could start rising in the latter part of the year.

Perot won't confirm it, but word on the street is the 300,000-sf project is close to catching its catalyst: a long-term lease with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which now offices at Trammell Crow Center in the downtown.

Victory, home to American Airlines Center, recently got its second adrenalin shot with the ground-breaking of the 350-room W Hotel. The hotel's upper two floors are dedicated 60 condos and a Bliss Spa, part of the White Plains, NY-based Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. plan to nudge the brand into the resort business. Marking the first residences for a W Hotel, condo reservations have reached 58% although the marketing center is still a few weeks away from its opening, Perot says. The game plan is to simultaneously open all components with the W in first quarter 2006.

In the coming weeks, Victory's lead man, Jonas Woods, will be ready to release the residential developer's name. The apartment component will have a 40,000-sf retail complement with fashion boutiques and restaurants.

The road to Victory has been anything but easy, but Perot has stayed the course. Now, he says, it's time "to bring in the product that Uptown Dallas does not have." Along with that, he tossed in a teaser about some corporate relocations being announced in May by "some of my friends who will be moving their operations here." At the end of the day, the relocations won't translate into a "huge job impact," he says, but "it will be a big mental impact. We are going to build the real estate to make Dallas competitive to bring them in."