By Candace Carlisle
Dallas Business Journal | Senior Reporter
When Service King Collision Repair began shopping for a new corporate home in North Texas, they looked in Richardson for an amenity-rich campus that would help recruit talented employees.
The 40-year-old company — which plans to double its operations soon — wanted a place to take Service King to the next level, said Kimarie Ankenbrand, a vice president at JLL, who represented the collision repair firm in its real estate search.
“They were locked in on the Richardson area and they needed an existing building with amenities,” Ankenbrand told the Dallas Business Journal in a recent interview.
With few existing options of big blocks of office space, the JLL team quickly landed on Galatyn Commons, a four-building, 800,000-square-foot office complex, near the Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts in Richardson.
Service King recently landed in 64,916 square feet at 2375 N. Glenville Drive in Richardson, but with 540,000 square feet still on the market, Galatyn Commons is expected to land even more big tenants circling in the marketplace.
That’s because the property’s San Francisco-based Spear Street Capital is wrapping up a multimillion-dollar renovation bringing its California-cool style to the office complex, with plenty of indoor and outdoor amenities meant to lure office tenants to the campus.
With only one building within the complex leased to Bank of America, real estate sources say they expect it to be leased by the end of the year. State Farm Insurance recently vacated the campus as it consolidated into its newly built regional campus.
“Spear Street bought this knowing that three of the buildings were going to be vacated,” said Chris Taylor, an executive managing director for Cushman & Wakefield’s Dallas office. “We started working with Spear Street on this redevelopment and are bringing in amenities to serve the entire campus.
”Taylor is leasing Galatyn Commons with Russ Johnson of Dallas-based Peloton Commercial Real Estate on behalf of Spear Street Capital.
The redevelopment includes a tenant lounge with Wi-Fi and outlets available throughout the classic rock-themed space to encourage employees to sit down and work away from the office. The lounge will also have a coffee shop with a full-service cafeteria that is expected to open later this year.
Spear Street wanted to create an amenity package that doesn’t exist in Dallas-Fort Worth, said Johnson, a principal at Peloton Commercial Real Estate.
“There are a lot of corporate users incorporating open workspaces in their real estate and so Spear Street wanted to bring these common areas to the campus that really become alternative workspaces for tenants,” he said.
Other tenant amenities include a conferencing center that can cater up to 150 people, a fitness center totaling upwards of 8,000 square feet, an amphitheater, an outdoor kitchen, bocce ball court, a fire pit and outdoor lounge area, a food truck court with outdoor seating and rental bikes to ride less than a mile to Richardson’s $1.5 billion CityLine mixed-use development.
Construction on the fitness center is underway with completion expected by the end of the year.
The leasing team is marketing the space at $19.75 per square foot, triple net — depending on the lease agreement. Compared to the rest of Dallas and its neighboring suburbs, the average price of office space is $25.11 per square foot, according to the latest Cushman & Wakefield data.
“This is a corporate, cool-type of environment that gives companies a tool to keep their employees,” Taylor said. “There’s just nothing like it that exists in Dallas-Fort Worth. From the interest we are having from the tenant community, we think Spear Street is giving them what they want.
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