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Old Posted Nov 13, 2014, 5:01 PM
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STLtoSA STLtoSA is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: San Antonio, TX
Posts: 333
Many businesses Own and Develop their office space including Frost. This project is a Weston Urban Development and will allow Frost to get out of ownership of a large downtown office building as well as other downtown properties in exchange for a sweet lease deal in Grade A office space.

This deal is the best for Frost, but that doesn't mean that they don't or wouldn't have developed their own Office space if the need was there.

I think that this is an unprecedented deal, and if it moves forward will do more for the future of Downtown San Antonio than any project since the development of the Riverwalk.

If the deal gets approved, here are some main bullet points:
- New 400,000 square foot office tower with Grade A Office space
- Redevelopment of Municipal Plaza
- Redevelopment of Metro Health (keeping Facade only)
- COSA centralizing employees predominantly in one building (most likely bringing more employees downtown)
- New residential along San Pedro Creek

That is a lot of change. In addition the City holds leases in more than 50% of Riverview Tower; what will happen there. I would suspect that Primera will attempt to sell the building, unless they can attract are large tenant.

I don't think that the worst case scenario is the deal not going forward. The worst case scenario would be that the Tower gets built and filled...Yay!
However:
- Municipal Plaza sits vacant outside of the council chambers
- Metro Health sits vacant
- Residential is not built, or very little is built
- Premera has issues finding tenants to fill the hole left by the city leaving

Sure we would have a nice shiny new tower, but there would be a lot of vacant space.

Now I am an optimist so I seem to overlook those things and believe that everything will work out perfectly and the CBD will become more lively and established.

This could be a groundbreaking project, but the agreement between COSA and Weston Urban and Frost is only the first step.
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