REALTY AMERICA BOYS AT THE PALOMAR

Just had lunch at Central 214 with Jeff Berry and Kip Sowden of Realty America Group.

The guys told me they started their first biz together at age 10, charging people to drive them in a purloined golf cart to their cars at the Byron Nelson. Nowadays the Palomar isn’t even “our biggest or even our best deal but… it’s a fun deal.”

Read on for why Emerging Trends in Real Estate is wrong about Dallas.

Anyway, and this is for all the naysayers of the Dallas real estate market: The Palomar was a disaster for so many years because, the guys explained, no one knew how to make it work. It couldn’t support an all-hotel, an all-condo, an all-office, or all-retail development, but it could support a little of everything and be a huge success. No one had thought of that before. In the end, Realty America triumphed where other companies couldn’t because of a little creativity. These days The Palomar is blowing past all financial expectations and has ceased to be a community eyesore.

“There will always be a bad market; we will always be ‘in a bad market,’” Berry said. “And we’ll (Berry and Sowden) always be contrarians.”

Creativity, not market conditions, created the Palomar. Take that Emerging Trends in Real Estate.