Alex Lepe
Independent retailers and restaurants around Fort Worth routinely lament they can’t get onto the Near Southside’s popular West Magnolia Avenue, where rents run high and there’s little available space.
The logjam’s broken a bit, with Fort Worth auto dealers and entrepreneurs Will Churchill and Corrie Watson - the twin grandchildren of the legendary Cadillac dealer Frank Kent - buying several buildings on the Near Southside for cash this year, using profit from the sale of their Honda dealership and another piece of real estate downtown. The portfolio includes several buildings in a line on West Magnolia, and Churchill and Watson are remaking that section of the street, bringing in high-profile tenants such as Heim’s Barbecue and Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken. Those two join the popular Churchill-Watson-owned Kent & Co. Wines and a new event venue called The Space to open in November.
Churchill and Watson are levering the combined parking of the buildings to help address concerns the adjacent Fairmount neighborhood has increasingly raised in recent years about traffic and side street-parking generated by Magnolia businesses. They’re also using the no-debt position on their properties to offer attractive opportunities to potential tenants. One big beneficiary already: the fledgling barbecue purveyors Travis and Emma Heim, who will move March 3 into their first brick-and-mortar location at 1109 W. Magnolia from a food truck and have taken on Churchill and Watson as minority partners.
“We closed this deal before I ever tasted the barbecue,” joked Churchill, who was put onto the Heims by his vegetarian wife, Rachael, who met the Heims when she was putting together an “I Do Barbecue” wedding shower for a friend. Rachael Churchill has yet to taste the barbecue.
“Well, no, she’s a vegetarian,” Will Churchill says.
Churchill and Watson entered the Near Southside in June last year when they opened Kent & Co. Wines at 1101 W. Magnolia.
In the last six months, Churchill and Watson have added:
The Quorum Architects building, 707 W. Vickery Blvd. at the entry to the future Hemphill Connector tunnel that will link Hemphill Street to Taylor Street downtown at West Lancaster Avenue. Churchill and Watson paid about $200 per square foot for the property, according to Quorum.
The historic Anderson Furniture building, at the southeast corner of South Main and Pennsylvania Avenue in the heart of the city’s South Main Urban Village. Churchill and Watson plan to take the existing building and add to it. “That’s going to be a full-blown development plan,” Churchill said. “Retail, office, live-work is the rough development plan.” It’s too soon to tell how large the project will be at this point, he said.
215 S. Main St., the former Wendy Davis campaign headquarters; 12,000 square feet over three floors. Churchill and Watson have taken the first floor for their new business offices, and office tenants have the second and third floors.
Cartan’s Building, 1201 W. Magnolia. Churchill and Watson will add 3,800 square feet to the existing 9,600 square feet, increasing the first floor by more than 2,300 square feet and second floor by more than 1,400 square feet. Cartan’s and a 921-square-foot tenant - which hasn’t yet identified itself - will expand on the first floor. The second floor will include three office suites, one already rented, Churchill said. The others, 1,600 and 1,200 square feet, are available. Churchill and Watson also will add a 900-square-foot patio on the second floor for tenants’ use.
1309 S. Adams St., The Space venue.
1065 W. Magnolia. Churchill and Watson have entered a partnership with another owner. Gus’s, a Memphis, Tenn., institution, will open in a 3,720-square-foot restaurant in the 6,600-square-foot building in the spring. The building has other office tenants.
1109 W. Magnolia. Heim’s is taking 2,800 square feet in the 8,388-square-foot building. Churchill and Watson will open an 800-square-foot retail space that will sell YETI coolers, Big Green Egg cookers, and Maui Jim sunglasses. An office tenant is in the building. “We will most likely move them to another of our buildings, and we will be looking at a tenant at Henderson and Magnolia,” Churchill said. “I’d like a cool apparel tenant. We’ll see what comes.” Upstairs in the building, Churchill and Watson have built two 900-square-foot, two-bedroom residential lofts that are available for $2,000 monthly rent.
Churchill and Watson were looking to quickly park the profits from the sale of the Honda dealership, which Watson had been running, after her husband died suddenly. They also sold a tract at the southeast corner of West Lancaster and South Main Street. The sales set up a so-called 1031 tax exchange under which Churchill and Watson re-invested the profits and deferred capital gains.
“We’re not actively pursuing anymore,” Churchill said. “We have a big investment, and we have to build out.”
Churchill and Watson have maximum flexibility to recruit strong opportunities because they have no debt on the properties, Churchill said.
“We weren’t buying these through the eyes of a traditional investor,” Churchill said. “Our plan is to finish these projects and do what’s right for them and our families and then pass them on.”
“Corrie and I have been blessed,” he added. “We’ve had opportunities growing up; it’s just our giveback to the community that’s supported us forever.”
The two are building a stable of auto and non-auto businesses. Churchill will run the auto businesses, including Frank Kent Cadillac and Frank Kent Hyundai, “and we are looking to grow,” he said. Watson will run the non-automotive businesses.
Churchill and Watson contributed to trying to help solve the parking problems off of West Magnolia in talks with the neighborhood and Fort Worth South, offering 100 percent valet parking for events at The Space and adding parking through their acquisitions. Fort Worth South painted no-parking zones on intersection curbs, added pylons at certain Magnolia street crossings pointing drivers’ attention to pedestrians, and is promoting the Alston Street garage north of Magnolia.
“We have over 150 parking spaces either leased or owned, all behind us or across the street” on Magnolia, Churchill says. “We’re very cognizant of who we’re putting in there; we’re trying to balance the tenant mix between daytime users and nighttime users with maximizing the parking.”
“Like Winning the Lottery”
Barbecue purveyors Travis, Emma Heim Opening a Restaurant
Travis and Emma Heim have come some distance since February, when they launched their Heim Barbecue business in a food truck on the parking lot of a bar at 201 E. Hattie St. on Fort Worth’s Near Southside.
The Heims, 20-somethings, will open a restaurant on March 3 at 1109 W. Magnolia, one of the buildings auto dealers and entrepreneurs Will Churchill and Corrie Watson recently purchased. Churchill and Watson have taken a minority interest in the restaurant.
“It’s like winning the lottery,” Travis Heim said.
The Heims have received multiple offers from potential partners to open brick-and-mortar restaurants, but all would have required they give up big equity, Travis Heim said. The Churchill-Watson stake is a “vast minority share,” according to Churchill. “We turned down a lot of stuff because it felt like somebody swooping in on what we had going on,” Heim said.
The Heims will run the restaurant, and Churchill and Watson will use their existing office capabilities to provide accounting, purchasing, and other support, and lever their advertising and public relations relationship with Fort Worth’s Hutson Creative. The restaurant is hiring a seasoned general manager.
“We don’t want Travis caught up in the nuts and bolts of food costs,” Churchill said. “Travis needs to make sure the product is great, and he’s the face of everything.”
The restaurant will open with a limited Friday and Saturday lunch and dinner service, and gradually move to a full seven-day-a-week lunch and dinner schedule by July 1. It also will serve brisket, pulled pork and sausage kolaches seven days a week, they said.
The restaurant, which has one employee, will look to hire 30-40 people, including pitmasters, kitchen staff, bartenders and bar managers. The Heims are also looking for someone who can take over the food truck from them.