Let’s go inside the City of Colleyville, Texas. Marty Wieder joined Jim Kelley on the Champions DFW Commercial Realty Radio Show and Podcast. Marty is the Director of Economic Development for the City of Colleyville. In addition to listening to the podcast, here is an excerpt from their conversation…
Jim Kelley: Why should someone want to live or bring their business to Colleyville? Give us your top list there.
Marty Wieder: There are a number of reasons. Certainly, the existing value of homes, people realizing that their homes are going to appreciate if they invest in the city. We talked about Whole Foods earlier, and Zillow, just last month, released a report that if you live within a mile of Whole Foods, you’re guaranteed you’re going to see your home appreciate. That’s really, for someone who’s wanting to make an investment, that’s critical.
We have an extremely safe city. There’s been a focus on public safety for quite some time. We have citizen associations that support both our police and fire, and we’re seeing others outside of just our community or even this region recognize that. CreditDonkey.com, just this two weeks ago, named us the safest city in Texas. Prior to that, SafeWise.com had recognized that a couple years ago. We had heard from Police Chief Mike Holder yesterday, when we were talking about this most recent recognition that there was a story that came out in San Antonio in the newspaper just a week or two ago. They did an analysis, and in San Antonio, quite a distance away from us, said Colleyville is the safest in all of Texas.
Marty: Well, that gets traction with not only residents, but businesses, as you can imagine. Greenbrier Companies, which located here a North Texas division, and they’re based in Oregon. When they came here in 2014, and then expanded again in 2015, that was very important to them to be able to have a place where the employees they brought in would be assured of property value increase, that when their employees travel, they knew their spouses, their kids, were safe, were in a good school district with the Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.
Those were all important. And particularly, for office, as we were talking about just this morning at the Colleyville exchange, to have what I like to call two back door entrances to DFW International has been an advantage that a lot of pilots that have lived in our city have taken advantage of over the years. But now, business owners and operators recognize, “I can go either Glade or Cheek-Sparger, I don’t have to go to the north or south entrance, I can kind of quietly go in and quietly come out of DFW.” We have all of the benefits with none of the noise, none of the flight path is over our city, and so that makes it very attractive.
Ron Taylor: as we think about Colleyville, tell us, give us some ideas that you have that where you see some exciting things coming for Colleyville. Maybe you have some insight you can share with us about some things that’s coming on the horizon, maybe some Colleyville listeners can expect to see in their area.
Marty: Most definitely, Ron. Thank you for the opportunity to touch on that. I talked already about the office that the Compass Commercial, Compass Realty, John Fagan, is planning and moving very quickly on. We are working…certainly, we haven’t even touched on the fact that the phase two of State Highway 26 reconstruction is about to be let, will likely start this summer, right in the core of our city.
So, in light of that, in addition to working to assist all of our existing businesses as we’re going to do with access and encourage people to go there, we’re looking at what else can we do to support the city as a whole. And I think we’ve got some great opportunities that would lead with the one that we like, certainly the best that we jokingly call “the last hurrah,” the largest collection of acreage in the city that’s undeveloped and zoned or shown on the future land use plan as being commercial, is a 60-plus acre track, a collection of properties at the very northern tip, northern gateway, so to speak, at John McCain and Colleyville Boulevard.
A good deal of almost, what, 38 acres on the west side, only two property owners, a good collection of on the other, for the balance, that provides us with a great opportunity to create an entrance into the community and somewhat brand ourselves but to maximize the retail and restaurant and corporate office potential right there coming into the city.
Listen to the complete conversation commercial real estate development conversation with Marty Wieder and the City of Colleyville when you listen to the podcast below. For a complete list of Champions DFW podcasts, visit us on iTunes, too.
Learn more about Jim Kelley, here.
Find Colleyville commercial real estate listings, here.
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