Downtown development is picking up. One of the many vacant buildings sitting in the downtown area has a new owner. The 1953 building that once housed the headquarters of H-E-B has been sold to Lynn Frazier.
On May 7th, the Ed Rachal Foundation sold the three-story building to the property to the businessman. Frazier has listed the LLC name as 807 N. Upper Broadway which is the same as the physical address.
“We are going to restore it and make it a Class A office rental area,” Frazier said. “We may take the top floor (for company headquarters), but I’m not real sure yet.”
Frazier says he hopes to re-open the building, fully restored and ready to lease in a year. He says he’s seen some interest and believes there will be a strong market for office space in the coming years with a booming oil and gas economy in South Texas.
The building went vacant in 1985 after H-E-B moved its headquarters in 1985. Other owners had big plans for the building including Orion Drilling who wanted to renovated it for its headquarters. After that didn’t pan out, the Ed Rachal Foundation bought the property in September 2017.
Frazier has been working on plans to build a residential community called La Visa Pointe on North Beach. It’s part of a larger plan with North Texas developer Jeff Blackard, of Blackard Global, to create an area with shops and homes. The anchor of that development project would be a $40 million canal to resolve the area’s frequent tidal flooding problems.
Frazier owns a number of local businesses, including Fajitaville restaurant and Hotel De Ville, both on North Beach. He also founded Magnum Oil Tools International Limited, a company that sells tool primarily used in the drilling process to extract oil and gas.
