IRVING, Texas — Read this story and more North Texas business news from our partners at the Dallas Business Journal
Multimillion-dollar homes are planned next to Citigroup Inc.'s Las Colinas office campus.
Some of the financial giant's executives have already lined up to buy, banking on what would be a minuscule commute.
The residential division of Fort Worth-based Blazing Hospitality Inc. recently broke ground on the small neighborhood of custom homes, southwest of West La Villita and Colwell boulevards. The homes will rise on 10 acres that had been part of the financial giant's campus — Citi (NYSE: C) owned the land for more than a decade before selling it last year to the local real estate firm.
The developer has started land preparation and plans to begin work on the individual home sites next year.
This is the first residential project in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for Blazing Hospitality, which owns more than $150 million of retail real estate locally, according to Shah. The company built a similar project in Orange County, California, he said.
Of the development's 22 home sites, half are already spoken for — Shah said a couple of his employees and five Citi executives were among those who put down deposits for lots.
"We didn't even start marketing this," Shah said. "They don't want to go all the way to Southlake or Westlake to live. That's what happened; a lot of people are living up there, and they're like, 'I just want to live near work.'"
Shah said the development came out of discussions among employees at the retail-focused real estate firm about how hard it was to find sites for custom homes around Las Colinas, an area that's largely built out.
His broker, Barrett England of Vision Commercial Real Estate, found out about the Citi property through word of mouth. Bank officials were ready to sell and closed the deal within 90 days, according to Shah.
"They were pretty easy to work with," he said. "They were like, 'Yeah, we can sell it, if you give us the right price.'"
Citigroup sold the 10-acre property to an organization connected to Shah in August, deed records show. The sale price was not disclosed, but the appraised value of the land is $3.7 million, according to Dallas Central Appraisal District records.
Citi employed roughly 11,000 at the large campus in Las Colinas as of last year, a spokesperson told the Dallas Business Journal at the time, but that was before the company said Jan. 12 it would lay off 20,000 employees companywide in an effort to save $2.5 billion.
It's unclear how layoffs affected the Irving location or why the bank decided to sell the property. A Citi spokesperson confirmed the land sale but declined to comment otherwise.
The company reported in regulatory filings having 239,000 employees worldwide as of December. Even without a retail banking presence in the Metroplex, the Irving Chamber of Commerce lists Citi as the largest private employer in the city.
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