R ROUNDTABLE can take a look at the energy efficiency of every single building. Think about a building and how hard it would be to know if you have a leak or energy. You can fly that drone around and figure out if you have an issue based on heat. You could [determine] if you have a pipe in the wrong spot. You can take care of it before it becomes an issue. You can go into a building, laser scan it, drop those points into a model, figure out the design, get it done, and then drop that back into Trimble [construction software] so that our field engineers have the right information to lay out that building. We’ve been playing around with an alternative for Multivista. Multivista used to sell KDC and others what’s going behind the walls. Now, we have GoPros on helmets. You can walk into the site, and it’s a 360 [degree] view to know exactly what’s in there. Technology has moved us forward, [but] I just want to be a downer for a second. It took 13 months to build the Empire State Building, a 100-story building. There’s no way in Dallas you can do even half that size in 13 months. It’s still pretty incredible what technology can’t do. GROVE: One of the biggest challenges for us right now, from a corporate perspective, is that we’re looking at more urban projects. They are denser, but [tenants] don’t want to give up their parking ratio. We’re looking at trying to park these buildings at four or five [cars] per thousand [square feet] in an urban setting. Parking is completely driving the design of those projects. And we’re building thousands of car stalls at $15,000, $20,000, $40,000 per space that may be obsolete in five years. KRUEGER: I bet if you flew in a helicopter over North Texas. ... WILSON: ... No cars on the roof. KRUEGER: [Right,] no cars on any top deck of any building. GROVE: The real challenge is what do you do with these spaces. We’re all looking at alternative uses. How do you go flat floors with no internal ramping and [where] you can reallocate the space? There are costs to that. CUNNINGHAM: Parking is absolutely my pet peeve. It’s the thing that drives cost on projects. It’s the least efficient use of capital. We just did a complete survey of our five buildings at Granite Park that are multitenant buildings. We grossed up the peak hour of the peak day and then extended that out to a 100 percent leased building, and we parked at two per thousand. We are building at 3.25 to four per thousand. Yet, any given day at Granite Park,
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we have 2,000 parking spots unused. That’s literally 22 million dollars in capital unused. It’s crazy, and we cannot get the broker community to listen. They just keep saying we want four per thousand, six per thousand. They are not using the spaces. GROVE: That’s also going to drive urbanization. Big corporate users have wanted to have these parking ratios. They have shunned downtown where the ratios are much lower. If we had an alternative, whether it’s autonomous vehicles or ride share, it’s going to open up the urban opportunities again. That’s one of the things we are most excited about with our deal with Mike Hoque in the Dallas Smart District. There are all kinds of opportunities, and I think they are going to be very successful. WILSON: We went out to our employees because we knew we were going to be constrained on parking during the construction and expansion of our new building. We offered to pay for a DART pass for a year. We had a model built out of how many people we thought would take us up on it. Twice as many took the offer—30 percent of our population jumped on it immediately. We have a corporate Uber account, and we have a few cars that are available. Most of the time—because I park next to one of them—the car that people can take places sits there all day long. We hope to increase the amount of people using other types of transportation in our building. We were totally comfortable with that because we believed the data. CUNNINGHAM: If we could get people to believe the data, we would quit wasting the money. We just ran a model on our Cedar Maple property that we’re redeveloping. The cost of reusing the flat slab in the future [for a non-parking use] is so significantly higher that it prevents you from building the project in the first place. We’re not going to need as many cars in the future, and we would love to be able to repurpose parking space, but we can’t build it in the first place because it’s too expensive. WILSON: It’s really interesting. We still see 15-year leases. So the spaces in the buildings that we’re designing now are for second graders who may or may not ever have a car. It’s really interesting when you think about how fast technology is changing, yet we are designing and building all these buildings right now. CUNNINGHAM: And the demands are based on some corporations. They think, ‘We’ve got 2,000 people and we need a spot for everybody’s car.’ That’s what you are going to build for that build-to-suit client without factoring in work from home, vacations, sickness, and when no one is ever at 100 percent employment. That’s the reason we use two per 1,000 usage. All of those things pile up, and it equates to a 30 or 35 percent vacancy rate all the time. We need the real estate community, the brokerage community to help us get there. That will help drive the cost of projects down, which in turn will help deliver better product at lesser cost.
How does Dallas rank in architecture, design, construction, and development compared to elsewhere?
REISENBICHLER: We have close to 26 offices all over. The largest office is in Dallas, and that’s largely due to the successful economy we have. This office has one of the most diversified practices. [Dallas] is a hub for the leading firms in the country. You have all the big names here. When I talk to my peers at other offices at Perkins+Will, they say, ‘I can’t believe that you have all of those firms in Dallas that you compete against.’ But it’s actually a collegial competitiveness. We all get along. We share information, and it’s actually a really nice environment architecturally. The quality of architecture has really improved over the last 10 to 15 years in Dallas. I think the Arts District was a big step. The bridges are really making the city. Over the last 10 to 15 years, it’s changed quite a bit to be more designed focused — more of a place where architects want to come work.
SPRING 2018