Hall Group buys Uptown Dallas office near Bank of America Tower

Hall Group has bought the 112,000-square-foot office building at 2525 McKinnon Street in Uptown Dallas from Elliott Investment and Morning Calm Management, an eight-story, 2003-vintage asset it will rename Hall Uptown, according to Connect CRE. The new owner plans upgrades to the lobby and common areas, new spec suites and a modernized building system; Eastdil Secured Savills represented Hall on the purchase.

The building sits within walking distance of the Bank of America Tower at Parkside, where Pacific Elm Properties, KDC and Sixth Street are developing the tallest tower in Uptown Dallas. It last sold for $46.8 million in 2017, according to Commercial Search, and its tenant roster includes City Bank, Rasansky | McKenzie Law and Crowe Dunlevy. For a buyer willing to spend on interiors and spec suites, the trade is a way to bet on the submarket's rental growth without carrying the construction risk of the tower itself.

The deal is a clean example of the narrow office-clearing trade this page has argued is real: it happens asset by asset, in locations with a visible catalyst, while the broad stack waits. Elliott Investment and Morning Calm are institutional owners exiting a holding that has likely been through the repricing, while Hall Group is a Dallas-based developer with a local history dating to 1989. Hall began developing its 162-acre Frisco campus that year, has delivered 16 office buildings there, and has kicked off a $7 billion redevelopment pivoting that campus toward mixed use. This Uptown acquisition is a smaller, faster version of the same trade: buy where the surrounding development is doing the heavy lifting, then put capital into the details tenants see.

No purchase price was disclosed, so the exact clearing level remains unconfirmed. The 2017 print of $46.8 million gives a basis for a building that has since aged into a value-add proposition, and Hall's plan to spend on spec suites suggests it is underwriting rents that will justify the renovation. Whether that math holds will show up in the lease-up of Hall Uptown — and in whether the shadow of the Bank of America Tower lifts this building or swallows it.