Recent commercial real estate activity across Texas includes senior leadership moves, a significant hotel refinancing and new industrial development starts, highlighting ongoing investment and operational decisions across multiple property types.
In Houston, Drew Morris has joined Cushman & Wakefield as an Executive Managing Director within the firm's Houston office tenant representation group. Morris transitions to the role from Savills, where he also served as an Executive Managing Director. He brings nearly 30 years of commercial real estate experience and will continue to focus on developing and executing real estate strategies for clients and their portfolios. Over his career, he has completed more than 500 transactions totaling more than 11 million square feet of commercial space in Houston and across Texas.
In Dallas, Logistics Property Company has appointed Kelan Padgett as Vice President for the South Region. Based in Dallas, Texas, Padgett will be responsible for development and leasing activities across the region and will help oversee the firm's Texas portfolio, which comprises more than 6,400,000 square feet of Class A logistics facilities. He brings substantial industry experience, having executed more than 3,000,000 square feet and nearly $900,000,000 of industrial developments and acquisitions prior to this appointment.
On the capital markets side, JLL's Hotels & Hospitality group has arranged refinancing for the Hilton Dallas Plano Granite Park, a 300-room full-service hotel located in Plano, Texas. JLL acted on behalf of the borrower, Driftwood Capital, to secure a floating-rate, three-year loan from a debt fund. Driftwood Capital acquired the property in June 2023 and has since completed a comprehensive renovation program totaling $8,500,000, which was finished in March 2025. The renovation scope included improvements to all 300 guestrooms at the hotel.
Industrial development activity is also advancing in the greater Houston region, where Scannell Properties has begun construction on its first industrial park in that market. The company has broken ground on the initial phase of Chambers99 Logistics Center, a master-planned industrial project of nearly 500,000 square feet in Chambers County, Texas. The development is situated along Highway 99, several miles south of Interstate 10 East. The larger of the two speculative buildings in the first phase is planned at 386,880 square feet, while the second speculative building is designed to encompass 104,520 square feet.
Together, these personnel changes, financing activity and groundbreakings underscore continued investment in office-related advisory services, logistics facilities and hospitality assets across key Texas markets, with institutional players advancing both development and capital strategies.
