Whataburger

This property used to have an old office building located on it. Just to the east of this property was a closed bank that was listed for sale at the time. Although the bank had the corner, the corner property wasn’t interesting at all because it was such an oddly shaped parcel. The value in this entire deal was only if you could get both the corner bank parcel AND the adjacent office parcel. You see, if you could get both, then you’d have a perfectly shaped parcel with excellent access that could accommodate multiple retail pads, a rarity in this corridor. Upon doing some research, I had learned that several groups had tried and failed to get the office property under contract, but after talking with the owner, it felt like I had a good shot of making a deal with him. At that point, I then needed to go get the bank property under contract because neither one really worked without  having the other. Ultimately after months of negotiations, I was able to put both properties under contract. However, the biggest challenge with any assemblage is trying match both contracts with similar timing, which is extremely hard. Unfortunately, the bank wouldn’t give us as much time as the office parcel had and we just hadn’t made enough progress with both the tenants and the city before we had an issue with the bank contract timing. The bank gave us one extension, but we still had problems and they weren’t agreeable to giving us any more time. Basically, close on the bank parcel or walk! Here’s where you have to have some guts. I knew any potential buyer of the bank property would want the office property too and since I controlled that property still, I knew that the bank would have a hard time selling just their property. Therefore, I took a gamble and dropped the bank contract. I still continued to work the tenant deals while I waited patiently for the bank to realize that I was the best buyer for their parcel. It took a few months for the bank to come around, but we put it back under contract, signed several tenant deals immediately, completed the rezoning, and closed on the overall land acquisition with no further glitches or delays.