A vacant, three-story, art deco building that once housed the headquarters for a South Texas grocery giant now has a new owner.
Local entrepreneur Lynn Frazier bought the building May 7th from the Ed Rachal Foundation, according to records on file with the Nueces County Appraisal District.
“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’s new ownership of the building is listed under a limited liability company with a name that shares the building address, 807 N. Upper Broadway. A year from now Frazier said he hopes to re-open the building, fully restored and ready to lease. Already, there has been some interest, he said, and he 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 uptown pink and green building has long sat vacant since H-E-B relocated its headquarters in 1985, but not without grand plans. A previous owner had plans to convert the office space into luxury lofts overlooking downtown Corpus Christi. More recently, Orion Drilling company had plans to renovate the property for its headquarters. Those plans fizzled and the Ed Rachal Foundation’s real estate entity purchased the property in September 2017.
Frazier is most recently known for his plans to build a residential community called La Visa Pointe on North Beach. It’s part of a larger plan envisioned by North Texas developer Jeff Blackard, of Blackard Global, to transform the sea level and sparsely populated area into a destination filled with shops, restaurants, hotels and residential living. 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.
