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REAL ESTATE RX FOR THE INFOMART

By Sally Giddens |

Here’s the latest home remedy for lagging occupancy rates in Tram-mell Crow Company’s huge trade mart project: take two of the new offices emerging from the Mayor’s Commission on International Development report, after making a political phone call that morning.

First, insiders say, the man himself, Trammell Crow, called in a few political markers and strong-armed the soon-to-be International Trade Resource Center into his World Trade Center (see related story on page 42). And now, the Crow family’s Infomart project is vying hard for another new office being created as a result of that mayoral task force’s recommendations.

According to (he Trammell Crow Company, though, it’s just one of life’s many coincidences that it is planning to create a Medical Mart within the In-fomart just when the Metroplex Medical Council (also a result of the international commission) has made a Medmart in Dallas its own priority.

From day one. leasing of the 1.5 million-square-foot Info-mart has been less than spectacular. Now three years old, the Infomart is still 43 percent empty and begging for a fix of tenants.

To that end, Infomart plans the medical mart, devoting some 250,000 square feet of space that will cater to local and national buyers of high-tech medical electronics equipment and services.

Just what that mayor’s task force had in mind.

President of the Infomart Bill Winsor says that the Metroplex Medical Council, a who’s who of the Dallas-area medical community charged with implementing the task force’s ideas, has been slow to jump on the Infomart bandwagon.

Getting the council’s endorsement would be a huge boost to leasing, but the Infomart isn’t alone in the bidding. In addition to the Infomart plan, the council has been talking to a California development group proposing its own site in Oak Lawn. Winsor, who doesn’t sound afraid of the competition, says that the California group approached the Trammell Crow Company to joint-venture a medical mart in Nashville “because they had never developed a mart before and recognized us as experts in mart development.”

So why isn’t the medical council turning to the hometown hero to build its mart?

Gary Wood, chairman of the Metroplex Medical Council, says his group won’t be rushed into a decision. “We are currently in the process of refining concepts,” Wood says, “and that could take as long as a year.”

Meanwhile. Winsor’s group isn’t waiting for the council that grew out of the task force that was part of a commission to make its decision. Says Winsor: “Our intentions are to go ahead and do it.”

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