Hogg Palace Lofts, pioneering downtown rehab project, is sold
The historic Hogg Palace Lofts, one of the earlier examples of downtown Houston’s residential renaissance, has been sold to Kline Properties, an Austinbased real estate investor.
The seller was Randall Davis, an early adopter of downtown living who redeveloped several buildings there in the 1990s. Davis renovated the eight-story Hogg Palace in 1995.
The sales price was not disclosed, but the property is valued at $11.7 million by the Harris County Appraisal District.
The red brick building at 401 Louisiana was constructed in 1921 by Will C. Hogg and his brother, Mike, who later went on to develop River Oaks, according to the AIA Houston Architectural Guide. It was built for upscale automobile retailer Armor Auto Co. as a combination showroom and office building. The Hogg brothers occupied a penthouse on the top of the building.
The building now has 79 loft-style apartments with exposed air conditioning ducts and brick and concrete walls. Units range from 670 square feet to 1,811 square feet. The building also features retail and office space on the first and eighth floors totaling 14,212 square feet.
Late mortgage payments persist after Harvey
When a post-Harvey moratorium on foreclosures came to an end, there was a spike in the number of homes entering foreclosure. Now, two years after the storm, the percentage of homeowners behind on their mortgages has fallen to 4.5 percent. But that share is still 25 percent higher than the national average of 3.6 percent.
“Thanks to a 50-year low in unemployment, rising home prices and responsible underwriting, the U.S. overall delinquency rate is the lowest in more than 20 years,” Frank Nothaft, chief economist for the real estate data company CoreLogic said in a report on loan performance released last week. “However, a number of metros that suffered a natural disaster or economic decline contradict this national trend.”
In Houston, the July after Harvey saw a 76 percent spike in foreclosure starts compared to the year before, according to property data company Attom.
Experts disagree on how much of that spike was caused by flooding. The federal government paused foreclosures in areas affected by Harvey for six months, creating a backlog of homes that may have gone into foreclosure even without Harvey.
Sales of smaller parcels in state top $1 billion
The sale of smaller parcels, typically 200 acres or less, was big business in Texas last year, topping $1 billion for the second year in a row as strong economic and population growth spurred activity, according to a new report.
The Gulf Coast-Brazos Bottom region, which encompasses the Houston, Beaumont, College Station and the Victoria areas, logged 1,525 sales of properties of 200 acres or less in 2018, up 18 percent from the 1,290 sales in 2017, according to the Texas Small Land Sales Report. Texas Realtors, which produced the report in conjunction with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, attributed the rise to recovery activity in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
Statewide, these sales rose by 5.9 percent to 8,036 transactions in 2018, according to the report. The tracts sold for an average of $5,804 per acre, up 5.1 percent for the year. The average tract of 33 acres was down 8.3 percent from 2017. Overall, sales of smaller parcels in Texas exceeded $1.1 billion in 2018.
The Gulf Coast-Brazos Bottom showed a 5.5 percent growth in average tract size to 19 acres. The tracts sold for an average of $10,937 an acre, representing a 3.8 percent increase and the most expensive in the state.
To qualify as a small land sale in the Gulf Coast region, the tracts had to be even smaller: 42 acres or less.
Workforce housing portfolio hits the market
More than 1,600 units of Houston’s workforce housing have been put up for sale.
Radco, an Atlantabased investor, is shopping around its Texas and Oklahoma portfolios, which include City Crossing in Riviera East, City Station in Cypress Station, City Chase in Westchase, City Gate in Champions and City Terrace in Memorial.
Radco purchased the properties between 2014 and 2017 with the plan to improve them and stabilize their occupancy rates. According to Real Estate Alert, a newsletter for institutional investors, more than 60 percent of the units have not been upgraded or have only been upgraded modestly, and they’re being marketed as opportunities for buyers to make renovations and increase rents.
The offering comes at a time when demand for Houston-area apartments has seen an uptick. Renters occupied nearly 7,000 more units in the third quarter than in the second, according to a study from Richardson-based RealPage, a real estate data firm.