One of downtown Dallas’ most visible office towers went up for sale and came back with nothing. The Harwood Center, a 36-story high-rise at 1999 Bryan St., failed to land a buyer in a fall auction and now sits in a kind of real estate purgatory. The nearly 735,000-square-foot building still has corporate tenants, but is roughly half empty, leaving owners, lenders and city boosters with a complicated question: what now.
According to a special-servicer filing tied to the COMM 2014-UBS5 trust, cited by The Dallas Morning News, “The asset was marketed for sale on the RealINSIGHT Marketplace, the decision was made not to proceed with a trade.” The same filing notes that a New York ownership partnership defaulted on the loan in 2021. The servicer did not spell out why a deal was pulled back after marketing.
Auction Push and the Listing
The tower was teed up for an online auction in October, with brokers taking it to market on RI Marketplace and opening bids reportedly set at $10 million. The Real Deal reported that the building was advertised at roughly 734,000 to 735,000 square feet and pitched as a prime candidate for a conversion or major repositioning rather than a simple lease-up play.
CoStar News noted that brokers leaned on the tower’s location next to the St. Paul DART station and talked up the potential for redevelopment or a sizable renovation, a common theme these days for aging downtown office stock.
Headwinds in Downtown Dallas
Any would-be buyer would be swimming against some choppy market currents. While Dallas-Fort Worth has posted strong leasing numbers in the suburbs, downtown has been a different story, with older towers fighting to hang on to tenants…