Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a quick tour of California to remind business owners that life’s a whole lot easier in the Lone Star State. Perry’s California critics called him “Governor Oops” for his miscues during the presidential debates, and Gov. Jerry Brown dismissed the Texan’s recruiting drive as “not a burp,” and barely even a certain bodily release of gas.

Laugh away, Californians. But Perry is playing the stronger hand here. Texas trounced the rest of the country our latest survey of the Best Cities for Good Jobs, with five metropolitan areas in the Top Ten, including the four best cities to find jobs in the next few years.

This year’s winner is Dallas, which shrugged off the Nov. 2011 bankruptcy of American Airlines parent AMR Corp. to rack up 2.1% job growth last year and is projected to continue adding jobs at a 2.8% rate through 2019 – more than 300,000 on top of the 2.1 million already in Dallas and its Plano and Irving suburbs.

For the complete article, please visit:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/02/25/texas-dominates-the-best-cities-for-good-jobs/

The Dallas Morning News

By STEVE BROWN

Real Estate Editor

Dallas’ hot Design District is getting another major development — this time with a large chunk of retail space.

Developer Harwood International, one of the biggest builders in Uptown, is about to break ground on the mixed-use project at Oak Lawn Avenue and Dragon Street.

The five-story urban-style development will replace an old showroom building along the east side of Dragon.

Harwood plans to build 46,000 square feet of restaurant and shopping space on the ground level, with 224 apartments on top in the project it calls District 1444.

“We see this as an extension of what Uptown has to offer,” said Alexis Barbier-Mueller, director at Harwood International. “The Design District is an area of Dallas that in the last five to 10 years has transformed into an environment that deserves this type of quality.”

Developed mostly in the 1950s, the area northwest of downtown Dallas started out as a gritty industrial district. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the neighborhood between the Trinity River and Stemmons Freeway began attracting large numbers of design firms.

About six years ago, builders and investors who had seen property prices jump in Uptown started looking at redevelopment opportunities in the Design District.

Since then, developers have constructed three major apartment projects with almost 1,500 high-end rental units.

Michael Ablon, who’s been marketing properties in the Design District since 2007, said most of the large apartment development sites are gone in the area.

“Any remaining apartments in the district will be built closer to Riverfront Boulevard,” Ablon said. “Everything that has been built has leased extremely well.”

Knocking down all the low-rise design industry buildings to construct residential or office space would be a bad idea, he said.

“If you tear everything down, you lose it,” Ablon said. “You want to keep the designers and what made it special in the first place.”

The newest Design District apartment building, the 1400 Hi Line tower, opened last summer and is almost half full.

“The project is going good,” said Bryant Nail, PM Realty’s senior development officer. “We did a focus group with the residents and heard overwhelmingly that they loved the fact they were close to Uptown but not in the middle of it.”

Harwood International’s project a few blocks away will bring more residents to the neighborhood and add to the retail and restaurant base.

“We’ve already pre-leased three out of five restaurant spaces, which shows that the demand is strong,” said Jihane A. Boury, Harwood’s director of leasing and vice president.

She said the developers hope to attract a small grocer to their project.

“We would love to do an urban-size grocery,” Boury said. “We want to bring a 24/7 environment to all the people who live in the neighborhood.”

Harwood International has owned the Design District property since 1996. The tract is now occupied by two large showroom buildings, which have been occupied by design and commercial businesses.

The developer will demolish the west side of the complex to make way for the new buildings. A remaining showroom will be used for a second phase.

“We’ve had this property for a very long time and played with the idea of building several times, but we feel now is the right time,” said Barbier-Mueller. “We will break ground in the spring, and it will take about 18 months to construct.”

Harwood International is one of the biggest players in Dallas’ booming Uptown market.

The developer has constructed five office buildings in its Harwood project along McKinnon Street. It’s preparing to start work on the 22-story Frost Bank Tower on Wolf Street.

Harwood International also built the 31-story Azure condo tower near the entrance to the Dallas North Tollway.

Barbier-Mueller said the firm is using its experience with the luxury Azure project on the Design District apartments and similar developments.
The apartments will feature a pool deck lounge with cabanas overlooking the city skyline, a fitness center, game room and gardens.

“It’s part of a new wave of products we want to bring to the market,” he said. “We’d like to build more of these and have started looking for more locations in Dallas and the state.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/business/commercial-real-estate/20130131-new-dallas-design-district-project-will-bring-more-retail-and-residential-space-to-growing-neighborhood.ece?ssimg=876585&action=reregister#ssStory876587

Location, location

For most of the original run, interior scenes were shot in Los Angeles. The new show, however, is a feast of North Texas locations, thanks largely to a joint venture between the city of Dallas and South Side Studios in the Cedars neighborhood south of I-30.

“There was a high probability that Dallas was not going to be shot in Dallas,” says South Side Studios founder Jack Matthews. “TNT gave us a list of what they needed. We agreed to no rent, and the city paid to finish out the studio.” Two Matthews properties, South Side on Lamar and the Beat Lofts, are filming locations.

Sue Ellen Ewing, now richer than her ex-husband, J.R., runs her empire from a contemporary office in Uptown’s Saint Ann Court. Bobby Ewing’s attorney overlooks the new Klyde Warren deck park. In reality, it’s the office of top-flight divorce attorney Ike Vanden Eykel.

“When they asked if they could use my office, I took a deep breath and said, ‘Of course,’” says Vanden Eykel. “Then, I was avalanched with 50 some-odd people who took over my space. But they put it all back, and there wasn’t a speck of dust on the place.”

If the show gets picked up for a second season, most cast members are pulling for shooting to resume in Texas. “Dallas is a home away from home for me,” Metcalfe says. “I have lots of friends here, and it lends a real authenticity to have it shot in Texas.”

On Wednesday, the day the pilot airs, the City Council will vote on a proposal by the Office of Economic Development that the production company, Warner Horizon, be offered a $200,000-per-season incentive package for the next six seasons to keep filming here.

Always fond of declarative statements, Duffy says, “Here we are and here we will stay.”

On a hilltop overlooking the Katy Trail, Gabriel Barbier-Mueller is pondering his next move.
The 17 blocks of his Harwood development district look like a giant chessboard stretching from the entrance of the Dallas North Tollway toward the downtown skyline. Completed office and residential towers are towering above some still-vacant blocks.
 
“We have land to build another 7 million square feet,” said Barbier-Mueller, who moved to Dallas from Switzerland in the late 1970s to learn the real estate business.
 
Since then he’s built seven Uptown buildings.
 
And done commercial property deals in London, Paris, California and elsewhere.
 
Barbier-Mueller’s next Dallas project at Wolf and McKinnon streets will be a 31-story apartment high-rise and a 27-story office tower linked by an urban shopping village.
 
There will also be a boutique grocer and between nine and a dozen small restaurants.
 
“Coming out of the recession, I never thought that we’d be planning new buildings so soon,” Barbier-Mueller said. “We are very busy and doing a lot of new things.
 
“Someone said it takes 30 years to be an instant success.”
 
It was three decades ago that Barbier-Mueller kicked off his Harwood development with the purchase of land for the Rolex Building near the corner of Cedar Springs Road and Pearl Street.
 
“This property was a mix of vacant lots and run-down houses,” he said. “When I bought the first block we didn’t know the Crescent was coming.”
But the site’s skyline views and location near the entrance to the Dallas North Tollway convinced him it could be a prime tract.
 
Boom begins
When the chairman of watchmaker Rolex was in town soon after looking for a new service center location, Barbier-Mueller dragged him to see the property sitting across the street from car sales lots and Mexican restaurants.
 
“He was considering a site up on the tollway,” Barbier-Mueller said. “But he understood the potential for this property when he saw the sea of cars passing in front of it.”
Still, after the six-story Rolex Building was announced, skeptics said the deal would flop.
“I still hear that from time to time,” Barbier-Mueller said.
 
More than 4,000 people work in the Harwood district. And the area around the development has boomed.
 
“There are 170,000 people living in a 3-mile radius of the Rolex Building,” Barbier-Mueller said.
 
Developer Harwood International’s newest building — the 26-story Saint Ann Court office tower — is 95 percent leased.
“We just had two people literally fighting over the same empty space,” said Jihane Boury, Harwood vice president of leasing. “We have over a half-million square feet of office lease proposals right now” for the entire project.
 
That’s why the developer is quickly retooling its office-building plans. Harwood’s Phase VII office tower proposed for Wolf Street could be up to 900,000 square feet.
 
And Harwood International has other office building plans on the drawing board.
 
“We basically can accommodate any size tenant,” Barbier-Mueller said. “We have the perfect building sites between the Crescent and the American Airlines Center arena.
 
“There is a lot of demand for office space.”
 
Coming attractions
Harwood is remodeling its 13-year-old Jones Day Building on Harwood Street. And a makeover of the garden it overlooks is also under way.
Downtown law firm Winstead PC will move into the former Centex Building next door sometime in August.
 
The firm’s planned Bleu Ciel apartment tower will be built at the north end of the Harwood district on the Katy Trail. It is the developer’s second residential project.
 
The 31-story Azure condominium high-rise opened in 2007. Its debut — a year before the recession — could have been better timed.
“Instead of taking three years, it wound up taking six years” to sell, Barbier-Mueller said. “We have about 20 left.” Five of those condo units are under contract.
 
His son Alexis is managing director of Harwood International’s investor relations and development business. He previously spent four years working with Fortis Bank but grew up watching the Harwood district being built.
 
“I spent some time working in Paris and the U.K.” before coming back to Dallas, he said.
 
Barbier-Mueller intends for both of his sons to continue with the ongoing development of the family project.
 
But with the fast pace of construction, it won’t take another 30 years to complete.
 
“Look at just what’s happened in the last few years,” he said.
 
http://www.dallasnews.com/business/commercial-real-estate/headlines/20120322-harwood-international-plans-new-apartments-retail-and-offices.ece