Posted Apr 6, 2018, 7:38 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2015
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 3,601
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Ooooooo, Robinson Ranch!
Quote:
Robinson Ranch owners court developers for 7,000 acres near Apple's Austin campus
Family inundated with interest for massive tract; Is there HQ2 potential?
By Marissa Luck – Staff Writer, Austin Business Journal
Apr 6, 2018, 2:19pm CDT
Rumors have swirled around the Robinson Ranch for years, and now the owners of the sprawling 7,000-acre site may be getting a step closer to determining its future.
The Robinson family is considering potential development opportunities for the vast stretch of land in Northwest Austin. The coveted site is north of Parmer Lane — pretty much across the street from the Apple Inc. campus — south of the Texas 45 toll road and west of MoPac Expressway. On top of that, it's just a few miles from Dell Technologies Inc.'s headquarters, Samsung Austin Semiconductor, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Abbott Laboratories, Emerson Process Management and many other major employers.
Over the last several weeks the family has been quietly accepting responses to a request for interest and qualifications from prospective developers.
Richard Suttle, an attorney with Armbrust & Brown PLLC who represents the Robinson family, said the family is evaluating its options based on the proposals it has received so far.
"It's no secret that the Robinsons sent out a request for information and for qualification," he said. "The property is obviously a very attractive opportunity nationwide and internationally."
He added that the family had "a lot of very interesting and credible responses" to the request for qualifications from people "highly capable of helping the family develop a strategy for the ranch."
He declined to say how many companies or teams responded to the request, or whether there was a deadline.
Much of the ranch is raw, undeveloped land except for a large limestone quarry run by Austin White Lime Co. Previously the quarry had been off-limits for redevelopment, but that doesn’t appear to be the case now.
Suttle said it’s yet-to-be-determined whether the quarry land will be included in any potential development. It’s still very early in the process and the family will need to take time to create a strategy, he said.
“It’s not a simple process because it’s a large piece of property and a long-term real estate play and the family wants to get it right, and that’s why they’re requesting help from the best and brightest,” he added.
Sources close to the Robinson family said the group hasn’t yet decided whether it will develop a large master-planned site or sell the property for someone else to develop.
It’s been 14 years since the city annexed and zoned about 6,300 acres of the ranch as a planned-unit development, according to city documents. That type of zoning essentially allows all uses — from single-family homes to skyscrapers. About 4,400 acres of the ranch are designated for mixed-use, high density and transit-oriented development, Suttle said. To put that in perspective, The Domain — considered by many to be Austin's second downtown and it's just a couple of miles east of Robinson Ranch — takes up about 300 acres.
Much of Robinson Ranch has no height restrictions and would allow for 100 percent impervious cover and floor-to-area ratios of 12:1, according to Suttle.
The ranch has been bandied about as a potential spot for Amazon’s second headquarters. It would offer a blank slate for the e-commerce giant to build a headquarters from the ground up, and with a MetroRail commuter line running through the property, it meets Amazon’s requirement that an HQ2 site have access to mass transit.
In a January interview with ABJ, Suttle said the family responded to inquiries from the Austin Chamber of Commerce in September 2017 regarding the potential to pitch the property as an HQ2 contender.
Suttle said at the time the family was open to Amazon locating there and would even consider giving the retail powerhouse a steep discount or a donation of land to make it happen.
But this week he declined to say whether Amazon executives visited the ranch when they recently visited Austin as part of a nationwide tour of potential HQ2 sites.
For now, the family appears to be moving forward with devising a strategy for the ranch regardless of Amazon.
“This is an ongoing process that the family is diligently going through,” Suttle said.
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https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/...h-owners-court-developers-for-7-000.html
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