In conjunction with CBRE and The Beck Group, Foley & Lardner LLP hosted the first annual North Texas Real Estate Summit in Foley’s Dallas office on May 23, 2024.

The premier event was well attended by key players in the North Texas real estate industry and the event served as a unique platform for owners, operators, investors, developers, capital providers, and other industry leaders to converge and engage in insightful discussions on current trends and opportunities within the North Texas real estate market.

The agenda featured informative and interactive discussion with an esteemed group of panelists exploring key topics shaping the North Texas real estate landscape.

Tyler Johnson kicked off the event with a few opening remarks followed by moderator, Fred Ridely, partner at Foley, leading a discussion with the founder of TRT Holdings, Robert Rowling. Robert shared his experiences with navigating the family business in the oil and gas industry to pivoting to hotels. Robert went on to discuss the sale of his family’s oil and gas business to the birth of TRT Holdings to the eventual acquisition of Omni Hotels & Resorts in 1996. Robert shared insightful details about Omni’s expansion under his leadership, along with the challenges Omni, and the hospitality industry as a whole, faced during the pandemic. Robert ended the discussion by sharing the importance of his faith in his everyday life and the constant goal to remain humble and tenacious in all endeavors, both in the present and in the future.

Chad Schieber with The Beck Group made intermediate remarks and was moved forward by Fred Perpall, CEO of The Beck Group, leading the second panel discussion alongside Jonas Woods, founder and CEO of Woods Capital, Derrick Evers, co-founder of Kaizen, and Joseph Pitchford, managing director of Crescent Real Estate. The group discussed the outlook of residential and commercial real estate in the post-pandemic world, and offered solutions and ideas to revitalize the modern era where employees may be more reluctant to come into the office. Ryan Thornton closed out the afternoon’s discussion with closing remarks.

Some informative takeaways from the evening included:

• Location Matters. The old saying that real estate is all about location, location, location is still relevant and in the ever-changing world of real estate, location is everything. It’s important to try to envision the potential of a location versus its current state of affairs. Office to residential conversions were a hot topic, with location again being one of the key factors.
• Timing Matters. Sometimes we are eager to want things to work out the way we envisioned and when what we envisioned does not come to fruition, we get defeated. However, sometimes things work out even better than we could have ever imagined.
• Innovative Mindset. Developers must come up with innovative ideas to reinvent office spaces to allow employers to attract and retain new and existing talent. The key to fostering “in office” culture is to offer appealing amenities. For example, installing “wellness” spaces has been a hot commodity and an attractive asset.
• Conversions. To offset the decline in usage of office spaces, developers are exploring ways to convert office buildings into residential buildings or even combining the two concepts – the idea is to “play offense and defense” at the same time.
• Subsidization. Cities should be invested in subsidizing development projects to boost the economy. When employees are reluctant to return to work, retail and restaurant operations at the base of those office buildings suffer from less traffic, which in turn leads to the eventual shutdown of these operations, resulting in an impact on the development and retention in the area, which can eventually drive people out and leave towns barren. It would be in a city’s best interest to subsidize office to residential conversions to ensure that constant innovative infrastructure and appeal is ever present in the vicinity to attract more people and boost the economy. There was an interesting discussion on how under the right circumstances city subsidies of office to residential conversions can easily become self-financing for the municipality.