On March 13, Sansone Group and Raith Capital Partners broke ground on Rancho Del Rey Logistics Park in El Paso, Texas.

Spanning approximately 3.7 million square feet across three phases, this development promises to redefine the industrial landscape of the region, ushering in a new era of economic vitality and growth.

Strategically situated at the convergence of Interstate 10 and Loop 375, and just three miles from the Ysleta-Zaragoza Port of Entry, a vital US-Mexico border crossing, Rancho Del Rey Logistics Park emerges as a pivotal hub facilitating the seamless distribution of goods throughout North America and beyond. With an increasing trend of manufacturing operations relocating from Asia to North America to better serve the U.S. market, the park’s strategic location offers unparalleled access to major transportation routes, ensuring seamless integration into the US distribution network.

The inaugural phase of development comprises three industrial buildings totaling 1.38 million square feet, slated for completion in Q4 2024. This phase represents just the beginning of a comprehensive vision to establish Rancho Del Rey Logistics Park as a premier destination for businesses seeking state-of-the-art facilities and strategic access to key markets. Bosch, a Global Fortune 100 company, has committed to occupying a portion of phase 1 through a lease agreement, underscoring the project’s immediate appeal and potential for long-term success. 

Sansone Group is proud to be partnering with incredible organizations for the development of Rancho Del Rel Logistics Park, starting with Raith Capital Partners. The team at Raith has decades of commercial real estate investment expertise, spanning various cycles in both the equity and debt markets. They have been investing in El Paso since 2019. Leading leasing operations is Colliers, a globally recognized real estate services firm renowned for its expertise in commercial property leasing and management. The Colliers New Mexico-El Paso team is led by Bob Feinberg and Tom Jones. Ensuring impeccable construction quality and efficiency is Catamount Constructors, Inc., a trusted leader in the construction industry with a proven track record of delivering high-profile projects on time and within budget. 

The development of Rancho Del Rey Logistics Park holds significant emotional weight for Ben Ivey, whose family has owned the land for nearly 90 years. The Ivey family has sought the right redevelopment projects for years, ultimately finding a suitable fit with Sansone Group. The collaboration between the Ivey family and Sansone Group reflects a shared commitment to honoring familial legacies while driving business innovation. The park’s name pays homage to Ben Ivey’s grandfather, King Benjamin Ivey. This familial bond is paramount, as articulated by Nick Sansone, who shared, “I understood the pride that Ben Ivey had in his family and this land. It mirrors the same pride my brothers and I feel in leading Sansone Group, established by our father 67 years ago.”

The development of Rancho Del Rey Logistics Park marks the dawn of a new era for industrial excellence in El Paso, promising to elevate the region’s economic landscape and leave an indelible legacy for generations to come.

Speakers at the event included Nick Sansone, Principal at Sansone Group, Jon Barela, CEO at The Borderplex Alliance , Henry River, City of El Paso Representative District 7, Illiana Holguin, City of El Paso Representative District 6 and a blessing by Father David James Ivey, the Chaplain of St. Michael the Archangel Chapel at Fort Bliss. More than 100 guests attended the groundbreaking from partner companies and neighboring businesses as well as representatives from The Borderplex Alliance, Horizon EDC, the City of El Paso.

Are multifamily owners gearing up for a wave of refinances? Or will they sell their properties in droves? Either could happen as more than 55,000 U.S. apartment properties have loans that are set to expire by the end of 2028, according to the latest research from Yardi Matrix.

According to a new report from Yardi Matrix, 58,533 U.S. multifamily properties are financed with loans set to mature during the next five years.

How big of a financial impact could this have? Yardi Matrix says these loans represent $525 billion of the total $1.1 trillion of loans currently backed by apartments.

Atlanta, with $34.9 billion in loans set to mature by the end of 2028, has the largest volume of upcoming maturities. Next comes Dallas, with $26.6 billion of multifamily loans scheduled to mature by the end of 2028; Denver, with $22.9 billion; Houston, with $20.8 billion; New York, $19.9 billion; and Chicago, $18.8 billion.

Markets with the highest percentage of loans coming due through the end of 2029 are Atlanta, with 65.9%; Denver, with 56.9%; Nashville, 56.2%; Las Vegas, 55.9%; Houston, 53.6%; and Chicago, 53.2%.

More than half of the multifamily loans found in Yardi Matrix’s database, $641.8 billion, equal to 56.3%, was originated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Next in line, at $187.3 billion, or 16.4%, came from commercial banks, followed by the federal government/HUD ($115.7 billion, 10.1%), debt funds (69.9 billion, 6.2%), life companies ($67.6 billion, 5.9%) and CMBS ($25.2 billion, 2.2%).

These numbers aren’t completely surprising. As Yardi Matrix reports, multifamily originations peaked during in 2021, when $194.7 billion of loans were originated, and 2022, when lenders closed $209.8 billion of multifamily loans. Low interest rates and high demand for rental living spurred this surge of new multifamily loans.

The interest-rate environment is different today, though, which could make it difficult for multifamily property owners to refinance. Others might struggle to sell their properties without taking a loss, depending on how the U.S. economy performs during the next five years.

The wave of maturing loans might result in an increase in multifamily sales during the next five years.

Of the loans in Yardi Matrix’s database, $61.8 billion are set to mature in 2024, with another $84.3 billion in 2025, $89.3 billion in 2026, $77.9 billion in 2027 and $107.3 billion in 2028. By percentage, 5.4% of the loans will mature by the end of this year, 12.8% by the end of 2025, 27.5% by the end of 2027 and 46.1% by the end of 2029.

Your favorite bench at the neighborhood park. The table in the corner of your local public library. The neighborhood bar at the end of your block. The yoga class at your gym. These are all examples of third places. And they are the key to building successful mixed-use developments and communities.

What are third places? They are the places we go to when we are not at home – known as the first place – or work – the second place. When you attend your local community theater, you are visiting a third place. When you sit on a park bench reading a book, you’re in a third place. When you chat with your neighbors at the local dog park, you are, again, in a third place.

And today, those third places are even more important. A growing number of people are working remotely, even if only on a part-time basis. They are spending less time in their second place, then, and socializing with fewer people. This makes the time spent in third places more important for people’s mental wellbeing.

Third places have also become more important in commercial developments. Mixed-use developments are thriving today, largely because of the pocket parks, brewpubs, dog runs, bowling alleys and gyms that they offer.

And this need for third places is only going to grow as developers see just how successful mixed-use developments that offer spaces for socialization are becoming.

We spoke with Alex Baum, vice president of strategy with ERA-co, a New York City-based global consultancy firm that works with clients planning and developing mixed-use projects, about what makes for successful third places and why developers need to think beyond coffee shops and bare patches of grass when developing these key spaces.

ERA-co is working with clients on projects in eight countries. The firm employes everyone from master planners and urban designers to professionals specializing in spatial analysis, place strategies and graphic design.

Here is some of what he had to say:

The general definition of third places is clear. But how do you personally define third places?
Alex Baum: Howard Schultz and Starbucks helped popularize the term with the idea that people should walk into a Starbucks and stay there for hours with a coffee. The bars in New York and the pubs in England are examples of third places. Third places have always existed. It’s where people have long exchanged ideas and where movements have been born.

But it’s important to go beyond the café, beyond the pub. We always joke about coffee shop or latte placemaking. When people are looking for something to add to a mixed-use development, they always say, ‘Let’s put a coffee shop here.’” Third places, though, are places that are familiar to your feet. They are places where you are recognized and you feel that you belong. It could be a dog park, bench, stoop, café or corner bar. It’s more about what the space provides you in terms of a sense of belonging and connection.

It could be your running club or the movie nights that happen on a Saturday night in a park in your town. It’s a place where you walk to and nod your head as you meet people. It’s the ‘where everyone knows your name’ idea.

How important are these third places today?
Baum: You no longer need to interact with humans to live your life. That provides convenience, but it is also a great detriment to society. The advantage of third places is that they connect us to the surrounding community. They expose us to more diversity. At home and at work, you don’t have diversity, or the diversity you have is fixed and not fluid. It is important to see others and see how they function. It’s important to become a part of the broader narrative of society.

What do developers need to consider when developing third places for their mixed-use developments?
Baum: For a development that is more focused on office properties, we know that a mixed-use environment demands higher rents. In a post-COVID world, when you are trying to attract tenants, you can’t just offer a nice space. You must prove to tenants that the spaces you create are relevant to a new cohort of employees who have the choice of whether to come into the office. You have to create an environment where relationships can be created not just in the cubicle or in the office but outside the office, too.

There are two things that are clichés when developers are creating third places: One is a coffee house and the other is a farmer’s market. We understand the idea of those coffee shops. But you need a diversity of offerings that is appealing throughout the day and at different price points. You might need a place where someone can go in and spend $3. They don’t have to sit down for a full meal. They can go in and not have to spend that much to feel welcome in the space.

With a lot of third places, going there becomes a sort of ritual for people, and that’s a positive thing for a development. Look at gyms. People make that one of their rituals, their routines. They keep coming back to these spaces. They might join classes that allow them to socialize with other people. That socialization often keeps them coming back. That should be attractive to the owners of the developments in which these places are.

What about in apartment developments? Are amenities such as on-site fitness centers and dog runs considered third places?
Baum: Some third places are private. They only impact a small number of people. They create a sense of community, but only in a vertical establishment of similar-minded people with similar economic means versus the entirety of the community that we inhabit. Those private spaces don’t have the same power or impact that public third places tend to have.

Public spaces just have more potential. There’s a park near where I live in New York in which people work out in any way you can imagine. There are people on rollerblades. There are people doing ballet moves, weightlifting and sprinting.

There are ways to create a public third space and do it well so that it is used on a consistent basis. You don’t want just a blank slate of grass that is only used by a few people at very specific times. It’s about programming a space so that there are things going on. It’s about providing areas for people to exercise or sit or just congregate. The most successful of these public third places have a diversity of uses throughout the day. Developers, then, shouldn’t just add green space. They should add pocket parks that have seating and spaces to gather.

People would never say this, but it’s a move to a more European-minded urbanity. Rather than vast parks, it’s about pocket parks, a substitute for the European plaza. Developers are considering smaller, intimate spaces. Governments and planners are doing a good job of mandating these public spaces, of saying you can build higher and denser if you provide more public space.

Did the lockdowns and business closures during the height of COVID instill an even greater demand in people for these third places?
Baum: Whenever there is a shock to the system, it allows you to zoom out and look at something from the outside rather than from the inside.

There is an exercise that we sometimes do: How will people feel if you take something away from them? What COVID did was take a lot away from people. And in doing so, it connected them to different faces and places that they weren’t engaging with before. National parks never saw more visits. That has since held steady and resilient. People looked at traveling to spaces within a one- or two-hour drive versus a one- or two-hour-hour flight. People spent more time outdoors, whether on their stoops, the sidewalk or the park.

People learned that third places were not necessarily commercial spaces, but that they can be outdoor spaces.

The Boulder Group completed the sale of a single-tenant ground-leased Sonic Drive-In property at 900 W. John Carpenter Freeway in Irving, Texas, for $1.81 million.

The 2,450-square-foot building benefits from its position along West John Carpenter Freeway which experiences 131,467 vehicles per day and leads directly to downtown Dallas. Sonic is also a neighbor to a wide variety of retailers including, Chase, Walgreens, Chick-Fil-A, Starbucks, Bank of America and 7-Eleven.

Randy Blankstein and Jimmy Goodman of The Boulder Group represented the seller in the transaction. The Seller was a Florida based real estate fund and the buyer was a west coast individual in a 1031 exchange.

JLL Capital Markets has completed the sale of and arranged financing for The Offices at Kensington, a two-building, Class-A office complex totaling 171,055 square feet in Sugar Land, Texas.

JLL represented the seller, Buchanan Street Partners, in the sale of the property to DML Capital. In addition, JLL worked on behalf of DML to secure the fixed-rate acquisition loan.

The Offices at Kensington is located at 1600 and 1650 Highway 6, at the intersection of Highway 6 and Interstate 69, Sugar Land’s “main and main” intersection. The property is highly visible to the 157,000 vehicles per day that pass through this intersection and is close to many of Houston’s major thoroughfares, providing a convenient commute to the residential communities in the western and southern suburbs of Houston. Additionally, The Offices at Kensington are close to a variety of retail, restaurant and entertainment offerings in the Sugar Land area.

The four-story buildings are 84.1% leased to a diverse rent roll of tenants in the real estate, accounting, engineering and consulting industries, among others. The properties are comprised, primarily, of suites under 5,000 square feet, which fits the needs of smaller office tenants that dominate the Sugar Land market.

JLL’s Investment Sales & Advisory team representing the seller was led by Senior Director Rick Goings and Managing Director Marty Hogan.

JLL’s Debt Advisory team representing the borrower was led by Managing Director Michael Johnson and Director Michael King.

Judy Adams, who co-owns Foelber Pottery at 706 Richmond with her husband, says she’s been “through thick and thin” in Montrose since the studio and gallery space opened in 1979. 

And now, a new challenge: Adams recently received an unsigned, undated missive, addressed generically, with a return address listed as a P.O. box: “It is with great regard and hope for the future of Montrose that we present to you the reintroduction of the Montrose Management District.” 

“If I didn’t know what was going on, because I’m involved, I would think this was a joke,” Adams said. “Everyone is just so furious and frustrated.” 

The Montrose Management District is back, revived in December after years of dysfunction and legal wrangling led to it going dormant in 2018.And its plans to tax commercial property owners has angered some longtime small-business owners in the historic Houston neighborhood. 

“All of us were stunned,” said Pat Greer, who has been serving homemade vegan cuisine at her restaurant, Pat Greer’s Kitchen at 412 W. Clay since 2005. “This is a real slap in the face.” 

Daphne Scarborough, owner of the Brass Maiden, a custom metal fabricator at 2016 Richmond, said she worked against the creation of a Montrose Management District in 2011 and has been consistently unimpressed by its management as well as its services.  

“It is taxation without representation,” Scarborough said. “They don’t have anything to offer our businesses. We wouldn’t run our business the way they run the district. They do absolutely nothing.”

The city of Houston includes a number of management districts funded by taxes on commercial property owners, with revenues used to supplement standard municipal services such as landscaping, public safety and sidewalk maintenance.

As an economic development tool, they are conceptually similar to Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones, in which a portion of property tax revenues collected in the zone are used for new projects within its borders. Some Houston neighborhoods have both: Montrose, for example, has a TIRZ created in 2015. 

When the Montrose Management District board voted to disband, commercial property owners who opposed it believed they’d unburdened themselves.  

“I was there the day it was dissolved,” Adams said. “We all cheered. It was great. And since then, it’s been wonderful.”

But Alan Bernstein, a spokesperson for the district, says the district never went away.

“Discussions with property owners about reactivating the district have been taking place since not long after its dormancy began,” said Bernstein, who is also director of communications for Hawes Hill and Associates, an economic development agency that works with a number of Houston’s management districts. “Major developers that are relatively new to the scene stated their support for resumption of services, as did city government officials.” 

Houston Mayor John Whitmire, who was inaugurated in January, did not respond to a request for comment on the revival of the district. 

The new iteration of the district aims to be relatively streamlined, focused on essential tasks and allocating 60% of its budget to public safety. Its new service and assessment plan stipulates that the tax rate will drop to 9 cents per $100 of property value from 12 cents. The values are determined by the Harris County Appraisal District. And property values in Montrose and other Houston neighborhoods have risen significantly since the district went dormant.

The assessments will be levied against commercial property owners rather than small-business owners, many of whom own the properties in which they operate, Bernstein said. Residential complexes with 25 or fewer units will be exempt, as will mixed-use properties where the business portion is less than 40 percent of the total valuation. The midrise and high-rise properties that have popped up in Montrose in recent years will pay assessments based on the valuation of four floors of the complex, not the entire building. 

The district has not yet begun providing services, Bernstein said. The board plans to hold a retreat to discuss its operations and procedures on April 3 at Cafe Brasil at 2604 Dunlavy; the meeting will be public, but no public comments will be taken. 

The board is awaiting city approval on nominations to fill six vacant board seats, he said, There are several active board members, including Dimitri Fetokakis, owner of Niko Niko’s, the Greek restaurant at 2520 Montrose Blvd., who also served on the district’s board during its previous iteration.

That wasn’t always a pleasant experience, he acknowledged, given the tension the management district caused among his longtime neighbors. Still, he agreed to serve again after being approached several years ago. He said the district’s functions are necessary given concerns of some over public safety and trash. In addition, he said, maintenance of projects being pursued by the Montrose TIRZ will likely fall on the management district. 

But Fetokakis isn’t oblivious to the concerns of his fellow business owners about the district’s revival.  

“I get it,” he said. “Everybody’s like, ‘I already pay my taxes. Why isn’t the city doing this?’ Well, in reality, it’s not happening, so now what?”

“Montrose has always been that eclectic place in Houston, but that doesn’t mean that we have to not take care of it,” Fetokakis continued. “We have to make sure it’s clean. We have to make sure it’s safe, as much as we can. We have all these bike trails in the middle of the street that are all crooked, and missing poles and things like that. Well, guess who’s going to have to take care of that?” 

He said that the revived district’s board plans to do more to address the “disconnect” the community experienced last time: “We obviously need to do a better job in communicating.” 

Many commercial property and small-business owners remain unpersuaded. About two dozen residents and business owners gathered for a meeting at Cafe Brasil this week, Adams and Greer said, where many focused on what they said was underwhelming services, even as the assessments took a bite out of their margins.

“In theory I could see how it could help, and yet we already get the services that they say they’re going to provide,” Greer said. “We are not blighted. It’s Montrose.”