Opus West's $50M Mixed-Use Development Gets City's Nod

HIGHLAND VILLAGE, TX-Opus West, getting a green light from the city, plans to break ground in June on a $50-million, mixed-use project on 86 acres at the "main and main" crossroads of a lakefront suburb in Denton County.

Steve Chilton, director of real estate in Dallas for the Phoenix-based Opus West, tells GlobeSt.com that the concept plan for Marketplace at Highland Village has passed muster with a 203,000-sf Wal-Mart Supercenter as the anchor, five junior anchors projected to take 10,000 sf to 35,000 apiece, 100,000 sf of specialty retail space and 50,000 sf for professional offices. Chilton plans to sell 23 acres to the Bentonville, AR-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. He estimates the all-in cost will be $50 million, excluding the Wal-Mart store.

Opus West will prep Wal-Mart's site in sync with its own. The land, bought from multiple property owners over the course of a year, takes up the northeast corner of FM 407 and 2499, both of which will be expanded in the coming years.

Opus West will build the lion's share of the Marketplace at Highland Village, but will use Huffman Builders of Dallas to raise the professional office space. Realty Ventures of Dallas is preleasing the retail component while the office space will be laid out as 6,000-sf, for-sale condos. Opus West will give nine acres to the city for a park and extend a jogging trail from the project site's northeast line to the southernmost tip.

Chilton says the project's been nearly two years in the making, the result of a push by former economic development consultant, Jeff Gustafson, to promote development in the 5.5-square-mile city with 12,750 residents and an average annual income of $102,000. The project creates the largest block of retail space inside the city line and puts Opus West back into the limelight for retail development in Dallas/Fort Worth. "It's a product type that we haven't worked on in this market for awhile," he says, "and we wanted to get back on it."

Chilton is pushing Opus West retail projects across Texas. In the Village of Bee Cave near Austin, Opus West is building a 750,000-sf power center and has sites under contract in Houston. He's got one contract for land along a Dallas/Fort Worth toll road and hopes to be holding another one in a couple weeks for a drawing board with a multifamily and retail mix.