The primary leading-edge suitor, for now, is Sam Ware, president of Lazarus Property Co. and owner of 1401 Elm St., a class-A, 50-story, 1.1-million sf property in the heart of the city. Leading the charge for Ware is Steve Everbach, managing director of asset services for Cushman & Wakefield of Texas Inc.
Everbach told GlobeSt.com that Ware had brought the idea to the table about two weeks ago. Since then, Elm Place has been placed on Web Real Estate.com and about 50,000 postcards are being readied for mailings this month to California prospects, says Charles Briant, Web Real Estate.com's president.
The groundswell is such that Web Real Estate.com too is jumping on the bandwagon and preparing to send out a nationwide press release to the effect that Dallas is ready and waiting for California businesses that want to come to the land of plenty. The city of Plano has placed advertisements in a Southern California business journal and Hall Financial Group is in the drafting stage of advertisements, also for a Southern California publication, for its 162-acre office park in Frisco. Word on the street is that Dallas and Irving Chambers of Commerce are coming to the party too. "It's turning into a whole crusade. It's really kind of cool," Briant tells GlobeSt.com.
The deliveryman is different, but the message is the same. "I don't think some of these companies are going to stand for it much longer before they start looking some place else," says Everbach. That some place should be Dallas, say those executives leading the charge.
Every facet of Dallas' quality of life is being dangled in front of California businesses caught in a chokehold by rolling electrical blackouts and exorbitant rents. Fifteen-minute notices about electrical shutdowns and rents as high as $60 per sf are no match for Dallas' ample power supply and CBD rents, which at 1401 Elm hovers around $16 per sf plus electric. There's no need for Californians to shudder at the "plus electric" tab since it's just $1 per sf at Elm Place, says Everbach.
Elm Place is the only property that Everbach's marketing in this fashion, at least for now. It is in the city's top five for large blocks of available space, boasting a tad more than 300,000 sf of contiguous office space--ready for move in, Everbach told GlobeSt.com. "It can't hurt and it is well worth a try. As we've all seen, some of the demand in Dallas has pulled back in the past few months," he says. But it's Ware that gets all the credit from Everbach. "Sam is always ahead of the curve. He's high energy, always thinking, always creative and a true dealmaker," he says of the man behind the California initiative.
The two-year-old Web Real Estate.com now has 2,000 properties on its rolls and is setting its hook with a 28,000-business database for Northern California that has just been bought for the "invitation list" to go along with thousands of addresses in Southern California and the Bay Area. Briant says he has been approached in recent days by owners of three or four other prominent Dallas CBD properties to lob the same strategy. As for Hall Financial Group, its courtship carries a dowry of 270,000 sf that has just delivered, 320,000 sf under construction and another 283,000 sf that's on the 2001 drawing board.
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