Two Dallas investors and developers will soon buy the city’s tallest tower and four downtown blocks to go with it if all goes according to plan.
Mike Hoque of Hoque Global and Mike Ablon of PegasusAblon said they intend to purchase the 72-story Bank of America Plaza from current owner Metropolis Investment Holdings, a Chicago-based real estate firm that manages assets for a German family investment group.
Hoque and Ablon said the deal is under contract and expected to close by March 2025. Ablon said the duo are subject to a confidentiality agreement and can’t disclose the price they may pay for the property.
The duo estimated they would spend about $350 million to liven up the blocks. They plan to build a “4-plus star” hotel with roughly 300 rooms that will take up eight to 10 floors in the tower. Additions include seven nearby restaurants, a parking garage and other items to strengthen what they say is a key corridor that could tie downtown together.
Much of the land now is just parking.
“We want to be an integral piece of the puzzle,” Albon said. “I think it’s a critical piece. They’re all critical pieces of the puzzle. … This piece we’re talking about sits very central to all of them.”
Construction on the project would begin in early 2026 and be completed by early 2028, according to the preliminary timeline. Dallas-based architect Hoefer Welker has been tapped for the hotel and office project.
On the hotel front, Hoque partnered with hospitality exec Dave Johnson of Horizon Capital. Hoque said the group is interviewing hotel brands and an announcement is forthcoming.
“I can not talk about it today, but you will be very happy. It is a very very very big international brand,” Hoque said.
The office and hotel will have separate lobbies. The hotel’s lobby will be in “glass jewel box” type structure next to the tower. Within that is a smaller glass structure with a 250-person ballroom/meeting room, Ablon said.
The new parking garage across the street will handle the hotel and office spaces, he said.
“We intend to keep the integrity of the office building intact. So we’ve designed the hotel ... to have a distinct identity,” Ablon said.
One of the seven added restaurants will be on the tower’s 69th floor, the old City Club. The floor will also be home to a bar, a spa and a wrap-around, reflecting pool, Ablon said.
Ablon and Hoque are quiet about who might take that space, at least for now.
The pair have quite the restaurant background. Hoque’s downtown spots include Wicked Butcher and Wild Salsa. Ablon’s firm boasts Italian eatery Sister Restaurant and Goodwin’s.
“We always want to make sure first and foremost we take the people who are doing great work here and partner with them more and then bring in some outside talent,” Ablon said. “That (69th floor) would be a kind of different piece that would show off that balance. That’s why we’re (waiting).”
The proposed deal is a bet on downtown and its office market. It’s a big reason why the project won’t include any residential units, the pair said.
The Dallas-Fort Worth office market has bottomed out, but it’s beginning to turn. The timing for Class A office space is “fantastic,” and this is a critical property, they said.
“(We’re) very bullish about downtown because all that Class A office space is already either converted to majority residential or about to become residential,” Hoque said. “We believe that … we need Class A office, and that’s why people are going half a mile and paying $66 a square foot in Uptown.”
For Hoque, the deal is the realization of a long-held desire. He’s wanted to be in Bank of America Plaza, and the best chance came two years ago when he approached Metropolis about the tower.
The ownership group wasn’t interested in selling it then, so Hoque settled on building a hotel.
But Metropolis changed its tune at the beginning of 2023, shortly after Bank of America said it would relocate about 1,000 workers to a new office tower overlooking Klyde Warren Park. The bank is expected to keep employees at the plaza tower through 2027.
“I talked to my investment partners and they gave me the green light,” Hoque said. “We’ve been talking to them, and we have (had) the deal under contract for the last six months.”
The site could be an anchor piece for a booming financial district and a larger hub of business activity that could draw tenants over places like Boston and New York.
Hoque said they’d love to land the Texas Stock Exchange in its tower. Its CEO, James Lee, raised $120 million from dozens of individual investors and big-time firms like BlackRock and Citadel Securities.
At its current timetable, the exchange could make its first trade in late 2025 and put up its first listings in early 2026. The exchange plans to have a physical site downtown but its location has not been announced.
The tower also isn’t far from Goldman Sachs’ new Uptown campus. The 800,000-square-foot site is expected to house 5,000 employees. The company broke ground on the project last August.
Then there’s the $3 billion convention center overhaul in Dallas. The site sits between that work, the West End and at the end of Main Street.
The pair also pointed to other Dallas-based developers like Ray Washburne, Ray Hunt, Jack Matthews and others who are doing work in the area.
The potential and local focus, the duo said, is there.
“If we could get Texas Stock Exchange to come to the building, we have a lot of land around us. All of a sudden you’ll see it start to fill up from Goldman Sachs to the convention center with not only financial services but it could be technology. A lot of technology companies are looking to relocate,” Hoque said. “It is positioned right away to do something significant for our city.”
