New downtown Dallas rental address is ready for residents in a converted office

From the corner living room in Dallas’ newest high-rise apartment, you can look out over most of downtown.

There are no signs that just 18 months ago this plush residential space was an empty office suite.

The Peridot apartments in Santander Tower are the latest generation of rental units developers are carving out of surplus office space. Close to 2 million square feet of Dallas high-rise workspace — much of it built in the 1980s — is targeted for conversion into more than 1,500 new urban housing units.

Dallas apartment builder Mintwood Real Estate teamed up with Santander Tower owner Pacific Elm Properties to transform 11 floors of the Elm Street office tower into 228 apartments.

The first of the new rental units is ready to show off to tenants.

“We have a waiting list of prospective tenants and we’ve got tons of tours lined up,” said Mintwood Real Estate’s Katy Slade. “Because of how pioneering this is for showing people how it is to live in an office building, we really wanted to have the leasing office open and the units open so people could understand. We wanted to be able to put our best foot forward.”

Built four decades ago as Thanksgiving Tower, the 50-story skyscraper has been owned by Woods Capital since 2013. Since acquiring the 1.4 million square foot office building, developer Jonas Woods – now the CEO of Pacific Elm Properties – has given the tower a more than $18 million makeover that includes new lobby and outdoor space.

Two years ago, the high-rise’s two top floors were converted to 60 hotel rooms operated as The Guild.

The apartment construction is a further step in the owner’s plan to repurpose the landmark skyscraper.

“They have a really great vision on how to execute this tower as a truly mixed-use building,” Slade said.

Mintwood took a large space on the west end of Santander Tower’s ground floor to create a tenant lounge area, leasing and management center and board room. There’s a fireplace in the lounge and a library-style common room.

“This space had been empty,” Slade said. “It had housed a bank at one point.”

Just outside the lounge windows on Pacific Street, work crews are finishing up the swimming pool and outside patios for residents. There’s a dog park going in on the east side.

WDG Architecture did the conversion design. Adolfson & Peterson was the general contractor.

Dallas-based Swoon designed the interiors. “We hired them because of their hotel experience,” Slade said. “Our vision was to have this walk the line between a hotel and residential to be able to provide that high-end experience.”

The apartments start on the tower’s 18th floor and are accessible only to building residents.

Rental units range in size from just over 600 square feet for the smallest one-bedroom apartment to more than 1,550 square feet in the biggest two-bedroom unit. Rents start at $2,100 a month.

All of the apartments have high-end appliances in the kitchen and large bathrooms.

Since the apartments don’t start until the 18th floor, renters are perched high above the streets.

“We paid a lot of attention to where the buildings are around us so not to have obstructed views,” Slade said. “I love the views because you are looking out over the city.”

The developers added amenity areas on the 25th and 39th floors so residents won’t have to always go down to the lobby area to gather.

Storage rooms were built in parts of the center of the apartment floors. “We also added little offices one floor up along the corridor that people can rent,” Slade said.

Mintwood Real Estate hopes the conversion of the Santander Tower offices will help with its next project – building 426 apartments in the 40-story Bryan Tower.

“Santander Tower is the place where we learn the lessons and sharpen our pencils for the next one,” Slade said. “We are doing things here that we’ve not done in previous projects.”

With office vacancies at a more than 20-year high nationwide, building owners are hoping to convert millions of square feet of surplus office space into needed residential units. Commercial property firm CBRE Group is tracking about 100 office conversion projects this year nationwide with about 18 million square feet of space.

A handful of office towers in downtown Dallas and Fort Worth are targeted for these redos.

Property analysts warn that not all office buildings can be repurposed as housing because of high costs and building layouts.

“You can’t do this with every building,” said Mintwood’s Nick Venghaus. “You don’t want to have so much inefficiency that it doesn’t make sense.”

About 78% of the average office floors at Santander Tower is utilized as rentable living space.

“A typical multifamily building is somewhere between 80% and 85% efficient,” Slade said. “We have a lot of different people talking to us about converting office space to multifamily.”