Lease-Up Crew Takes Over 450,000-SF Project

HIGHLAND VILLAGE, TX-The Weitzman Group has won the lease-up assignment for the 450,000-sf Marketplace at Highland Village. The first wave of retail for the Opus West Corp. development is in the midst of tenant finish-out.

The clean-up crew, which also gets the gatekeeping assignment, consists of Earl Harris, vice president for the Dallas-based Weitzman, and associates Kenneth Novorr and Andrew Sanderson. According to Novorr, 30,000 sf is all that is left to fill in the $60-million Marketplace at Highland Village, situated on 86 acres at the corner of FM 407 and FM 2499 where developers are underway with more than 1.5 million sf of retail space. "We expect 50% of that will be leased before the year ends and the whole thing will be leased in the first quarter," he tells GlobeSt.com. "Towards the end, it gets tricky."

Realty Ventures LP of Fort Worth led Opus West's preleasing campaign. The development will include a 203,000-sf Wal-Mart Supercenter, which has yet to break ground. City officials recently got the Bentonville, AR-based retail giant to redesign the large-format store, replacing a vehicle repair component with a bicycle shop fronting a park that's planned for nine acres donated by the Phoenix-based Opus. The delivery is penciled for July 2007.

Novorr says the pipeline of pending deals includes a pizza shop, dry cleaners, juice store and cigar store. The team also has letters of intent for the last two pad sites. The upcoming rollout includes a 45,000-sf LA Fitness, 50,000-sf TJ Maxx and TJ Maxx HomeGoods, 20,000-sf Office Depot, 15,000-sf Petco and an Applebee's Neighborhood Bar & Grill on a pad site. Inline space is being quoted at $26 per sf while periphery buildings are tagged at $30 per sf.

Meanwhile, Huffman Builders of Dallas has just started prepping the site for its part of the plan--50,000 sf of office condos. The Marketplace at Highland Village was the first commercial project to come out of the ground at the city's "Main and Main" crossroads. Also working toward delivery is the Jacksonville, FL-based Regency Centers Corp.