Austin Four Seasons Residences Breaks Ground
With 166 condo units priced from $500 - $750 per square foot and monthly condo fees of $0.61 / square foot, the Four Seasons Residences represents an ambitious super-luxury project for Austin. It was not too long ago that the Four Hotel Seasons hotel itself was almost a strange site in such a down-to-earth town. But times have changes and demand is strong. The project reports that they have received 10% deposits for 40% of the planned units. Interestingly enough, half of the buyers so far hail from outside of Austin -- a new twist for the emerging local high-end condo market. However, with 60% of units to sell, much work still lies ahead.
When combined with the Austonian and W, the Four Seasons Residences represents an entirely new ultra-luxury urban high-rise experience that has never existed and that will not exist in Austin until the first of these projects hits the market.
Here is a summary from the Statesman:
The Four Seasons Residences, one of downtown Austin's highest profile luxury condominium towers, will break ground this week, seven years after initial plans were thwarted by the tech bust of 2001.The newly designed 32-story tower will rise in the parking lot next to the Four Seasons Hotel overlooking Lady Bird Lake. The building's 166 residences will be priced from $400,000 to $4 million, with units from 880 to 5,500 square feet. Four Seasons will manage the building, which is expected to open in the first quarter of 2010 and become a landmark on the evolving skyline.The $125 million project is a venture between local developers Ardent Residential and Atlanta-based Post Properties Inc, the financier. Michael Graves & Associates Inc. designed the tower, which will have a terra cotta-colored brick base that will blend with the hotel, developers say.The first major sign of construction will come later this week when crews begin demolishing the hotel's 123-space surface parking, which will be redirected to an underground garage. The new tower will include five levels of above-ground parking.The construction entrance and staging area will be on Trinity Street to minimize disruption for the hotel, said Art Carpenter, a principal with Ardent Residential.
New Businesses to Open on 2nd Street
One of the reasons for the success of the 2nd Street district is the centralized leasing strategy which groups all 44 retail locations in AMLI downtown, the CSC building, the Silicon Labs Building, and in City Hal under the control of a central leasing authority currently managed by AMLl. By centrally managing leasing, the district has been able to limit chain businesses while building a diverse collection of retail stores and restaurants that bring life to the neighborhood. As the district grows in size, it show only become stronger.
With the coming completion of the AMLI on 2nd rental tower between San Antonio & Guadalupe, a number of new businesses are soon to open on 2nd Street and in the surrounding blocks that form the district.
IMAGE: New AMLI on 2nd Tower Extends the 2nd Street District
The completion of the AMLI tower will bring 11 new retail businesses while bringing new life to the 7 businesses in the Silicon Labs building across the street. So far, 7 out of the 11 new retail locations in the AMLI Tower have been leased. They include the following new business which will soon appear on 2nd street. in fact, a couple—such as St. Bernard Sports—have already opened. The new 2nd Street businesses include:
- Z Pizza - An new downtown pizza restaurant
- Málaga - A Tapas restaurant which is moving from 4th street
- Minx
- La Condesa
- Kirk Furniture - A local vintage furniture store
- St. Bernard Sports - A Sporting Goods Store on 3rd street
- Dr Shane Matt -- Appears to be a dentist office
In addition, a few additional businesses are set to open soon throughout the district:
- Taste Select Wines
- Beyond Traditions Jewelry
- Mama Fu's - A local Asian Food Chain
With these additions, 42 of 55 of the retail stores in the 2nd Street District are now occupied. As new buildings such as the expansive Block 21 complex a W Hotel & Residences completed the street, the 2nd Street District will continue to shift Austin's center of gravity in its direction.
Austin Towers One Year Anniversary!
As we plan for a great second year, I would like to encourage everyone to register and to provide any ideas, tips, and feedback you may have. Nothing makes the editors at Austin Towers happier than learning about our readers. If the site is useful, please register! Your information will never be disclosed to other parties and every message will include a way to opt out of future news updates and invitations. Thank you for reading Austin Towers!
As you know, Austin Towers posts news and analysis on the downtown condo market 2-3 times every week. If you use Google for search, we've made it easy to add our news feed to your google home page. Simply click on the "Add to Google" button on the right and you will be directed to Google to create an iGoogle search page like the one below, to add AustinTowers to an existing iGoogle page, or to add Austin Towers to Google Reader. Once added, you'll see our latest headlines whenever you visit your iGoogle page to conduct a web search. If you later change your mind, it's easy to remove the Austin Towers feed or to revert to a basic search page.
As many of you know, you can also subscribe to the Austin Towers feed on this site by simply clicking the Orange RSS feed button on the sidebar or by following this link: AustinTowers RSS Feed
Thanks for your support! - Paul D'Arcy, Editor
New Downtown Project: Quorum Lofts
The new project will convert a 1964 office complex on 13th & Guadalupe -- 2 blocks West of the Capital -- into a dramatic modern
26-unit condo project. With the Capital-area location, the project (and the name) are targeting legislators and other Capital district employees who might be the excited by the idea of walking just a few hundred feet to work. The project is aiming for a crazy fast development timeline with delivery before the end of 2008. Although the developers hope to beat the rush of projects arriving in 2009, the deadline will be hard to reach unless they receiving zoning approval and begin construction quickly.
Units in the Quorum Lofts will be big - ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 square feet with prices starting near $500,000. The project will include a rooftop infinity pool and lots of nice features such as high 10 foot ceilings, granite counter tops,and jetted soaking tubs. We have posted a full profile here.
Here is additional information from the Austin Business Journal:
Local developer John Graham knows there are plenty of condo projects on the horizon for downtown Austin.But with most of the next set of big towers not scheduled for delivery until 2009, Graham sees big potential in bringing a development to market quicker -- and in a location just steps away from the Capitol.Graham's company, AustinPartners.net, hopes to get approval on a building permit in the next month for redevelopment of the property at 1300 Guadalupe St. The $10 million Quorum project slated for completion late next year would turn a three-story office building constructed in 1964 into modern, loft-style condos.Work is set to begin in January on the project that will add a fourth floor to the building and create 26 condos ranging in size from 1,450 square feet to 2,450 square feet and priced from $350 a square foot to $450 a square foot.The fourth floor will feature a spa and negative-edge, or "infinity," pool overlooking the Capitol. A glass elevator fronting Guadalupe will feature views east toward the Capitol. A second phase that would add structured parking and more units is also being considered.
Three Downtown Projects Likely Postponed
As a result of slow progress, we have moved three projects into the pending stage until we receive clear confirmation that they are proceeding -- or if not -- that they have been postponed or cancelled. The delayed projects are:
5th & Congress
7th & Rio Grande
Residences at the Hotel Van Zandt
Now, with separate sections for active, pending, and cancelled projects on the Austin Towers home page, it will make it much easier for condo buyers to watch the projects that are most likely to be completed! In addition, we have adjusted the dates on a number of other projects to more accurately reflect current development timelines. If you know of any other delayed or pending projects, please drop us a note.
Another Option: Older Downtown Austin Condo Projects
If you are interested in a 3 bedroom 2,000 square foot high-rise downtown condo unit for $425,000 or a 1,000 square foot condo with 2 bedrooms and 2 baths for under $250,000, many buyers would be surprised that they exist today. While the older buildings may not offer the same amenities and quality of build-out -- especially when it comes to kitchens and bathrooms -- the older building do offer a unique combination of location and space that can't be beat.
To help downtown Austin condo buyers evaluate all available options, we have further expanded our Listings page to include four older projects. Now, the expanded Listings include virtually every downtown Austin condo unit listed on MLS today. There is not better place to search for units or track the downtown condo market!
Here are links to the the new listings pages for older downtown Austin condo projects:
Cambridge Condos (18th & Lavaca) -- MLS Listings
Penthouse Condominiums (12th & Guadalupe) -- MLS Listings
Towers of Town Lake Condos (I35 & Town Lake) -- MLS Listings
Westgate Condos (11th & Colorado) -- MLS Listings
New Condo Listings: Spring, Barton Place, Bridges on the Park
Spring Condominiums Listings
Barton Place Listings
Bridges on the Park Listings
Presidio at Judges Hill
Austin Towers is the only source for current building-by-building listings. In addition to the standard Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listings provided by realtors on completed projects, the listing guide also provides direct links to developer listings which are not included in the MLS.
Balancing Music & Growth: Austin's Unique Downtown Challenge
Whenever a conference planner chooses Austin for an event, they typically need to sell the city to potential attendees as much as they need to sell the conference event. Time after time, they use the same hook: visit the Live Music Capital of the World.
Between SXSW. Austin City Limits, and the daily music shows throughout downtown, live music supposedly contributes $420 million in direct sales and $580 million in tourist revenue each year to the city economy. By the way, these numbers exclude all of the convention-goers drawn to the Live Music Capital of the World for a medical, education, technology or other non-music event -- but who sign-up partly to experience Austin's unique music scene.
The issue is that downtown land -- especially land that can support high-rise development -- is extremely limited. As a result, new retail, residential, and commercial buildings have been replacing older music venues. With scarce land, property values and property tax assessments have been skyrocketing, forcing landlords to raise rents on music venues. At the same time, musicians and the rest of the creative class have been increasingly pushed out of central Austin as rents have risen. As if that is not enough, some new downtown condo residents have been complaining about the noise created by music venues. The bottom-line, Austin's music scene is under siege.
The Austin music scene is a fragile ecosystem. SXSW requires 50+ venues to keep the event in downtown Austin. As venues are lost, musicians have fewer places to work, and the music community shrinks making it more difficult to support new venues. Today, believe it or not, 20,000 Austin resident make a living in the music industry. If music gets forced out of downtown, the whole city will suffer.
The New Austin Music Hall
Fortunately, the city is looking closely at this situation. As part of a new cultural arts master plan, the city is looking at creating a downtown entertainment district covering sixth street, the red river area, and the warehouse district. Some private developers are also helping out. Novare, for example, helped to fund the redevelopment of Austin Music Hall when it began construction of the adjacent 360 project.
The next few years represent a critical opportunity for the city to permanently protect it's status as the Live Music Capital. Otherwise, as downtown growth accelerates, one of the main draws for downtown living may itself be endangered.
The Most Controversial Project: Version 3.0
The Congress Avenue Marriott, V. 1.0
The original plan for the project included 1,000 rooms across 3 separate Marriott-branded hotels in one convoluted multi-facted building. The second version of the project included two hotels in one building. Version 3.0, announced today, includes just one Marriott hotel with 1,000 rooms. With the changes and increases in downtown construction costs, the project budget has supposedly climbed from $185 million to more than $250 million.
The ironic thing is that the hotel is actually a good thing for Austin. A 1,000 room hotel will allow the city to book larger conferences and events -- bringing valuable tourism dollars and jobs to Austin. Their is a shortage of rooms downtown and a crazy large 1,000 room hotel can make a big difference. The problem is all in the developer's and Marriott's execution of the project: they seem to have no respect for downtown Austin and no interest in making it better place. If they hired an architect and surrounded the building with ground-floor retail, this would be a much more palatable.
Here is a summary from the Austin Business Journal:
Plans for a downtown hotel project at Second Street and Congress Avenue have changed yet again and will now feature a single, 1,000-room Marriott convention center hotel.White Lodging Services Corp. had originally planned to build three different hotels at the northeast corner of the intersection where Las Manitas café and other businesses currently stand. The proposed hotels included a 650-room Marriott convention center hotel, 200-room Renaissance Hotel and 150-room Springhill Suites hotel.Last summer the company switched course on the project saying it would build an 800-room convention center Marriott and 200-room upscale J.W. Marriott. The move was said to be due in part to greater demand for rooms dedicated to convention-goers and the growing market for upscale lodging downtown.This week White Lodging confirmed it will now build a single 1,000-room Marriott, but a spokesperson could not comment on why the group is altering course a third time. The most recent pricetag on the project puts the cost at about $250 million, though it's unclear if the new plan would alter that in any way.
We'll post new renderings as soon as they become available.
The Austin Parking Enterprise has Arrived
As we have written before, it is clear that parking is becoming a problem: the easier it is to park downtown, the more people will come downtown to shop, eat, live, work, and entertain themselves. High parking costs are already an obstacle to businesses thinking of moving into the city center. Many companies who can afford the rent are put off by the $150-$200 / month cost of providing parking for each and every employee. As parking costs continue to rise, it becomes a tax on every Austinite who wants to enjoy downtown, and it lowers the value of business and buildings who don't see as many visitors as they might if parking were cheap and plentiful.The result hurts the city by reducing sales tax and property tax revenues.
Here is a summary from the Austin Business Journal:
The Austin City Council approved a resolution to create a city agency that will build, finance and own structured parking garages in the city.The Austin Parking Enterprise will operate the parking garage planned as part of the Seaholm Power Plant redevelopment, and any publicly owned parking garage approved in the Green Water Treatment Plant redevelopment. The parking enterprise will consider expanding the supply of publicly-available parking in areas like downtown, the area around North Burnet/Gateway in the so-called "Second Downtown" area and in other transit-oriented developments near future commuter rail stops, and South Congress Avenue.The agency is intended to provide a dedicated long-term funding stream for planning and investing in pedestrian, bicycle and transit infrastructure, trails, and parking infrastructure after covering the costs of parking operations and maintenance. The agency would also make the city eligible for federal transit reimbursements and other state and federal grants.
As we have asserted, at $19,000 a space, parking is expensive to build. While the City clearly sees the parking shortage as a opportunity to add capacity and earn money for the city, this perspective may be short-sited. By focusing more on low cost parking and less on profits, the city could likely generate more revenue through sales and property taxes as well as hie prices for city owned land sold in the future.
Is That Really the View?
For example, here are two "views" from future units in the Austonian -- a 50+ story luxury project on Congress which is currently just a hole in the ground. The first image shows the West view from the 11th floor:
The second images shows the same view from a unit on the 54th floor:
Sooooo . . . . .what is their trick? How can they capture accurate views from hundreds of units in different positions on different floors. Do they use airplanes? Helicopters? No! They, like many condo developers across the United States, depend on Austin-based "Blimp Photo Services" to get these special images.
Here is the summary from the Statesman:
In recent years, Lockhart's 16-year-old Austin-based Blimp Photo Services business has been buoyed locally and nationally by the boom in high-rise condominium construction. He has taken panoramic aerial views of planned residential and commercial buildings in major U.S. cities and Canada. . . In Austin, he has photographed the viewsheds — the technical name for the views from a particular vantage point — for most of the downtown condominium projects that are under construction or are being planned. They include the Shore, Spring, the Austonian, the W hotel/condominium project and the Four Seasons Residences, a project that is expected break ground soon next to the Four Seasons Hotel.Brett Denton, a partner with Ardent Residential, which is developing the luxury Four Seasons high-rise, said Lockhart's photography "has been invaluable in helping our buyers better visualize the views from the various unit locations on different floors of our building."
While I am not sure how one gets started in personal blimp photography, it does serve an important market niche. For anyone who is planning to lay down big bucks on a high-rise condo that has not been built, it makes all the difference in the world to get a blimps-eye perspective of your future view.
Welcome to Austin: The New Migration Boom
Today's news is good news for downtown residents and bad news for anyone that sits in Austin traffic: new statistics from the census bureau show a dramatic acceleration in migration into Travis county and the rest of the Austin metropolitan area. The latest statistics, covering the full year 2006 (Thanks Census Bureau for the quick turn around!), show that a net 9,405 migrated into Travis county in 2006. This tops the tech boom record of 8,575 set in 2000 and represents a strong turn-around from 2002, 2003, and 2004 when the county experienced a net outbound migration.
Here are the migration statistics from 2000 - 2006:
2000 | +8,575
2001 | +4,867
2002 | -11,402
2003 | -7,152
2004 | -1,787
2005 | +1,602
2006 | +9,405
In addition, total migration into central Texas from California more than doubled over the last two years. Californians represent a major portion of new Austin residents, many of whom come with large amounts of home equity. AustinTower's own survey and readership statistics show that Californians are the most active out-of-state shoppers for downtown Austin condos -- followed by residents of New York, Florida, and Illinois.