It would be Voodoo Doughnut’s second location in Washington, following a Vancouver shop that opened in early 2022.

Boeing’s Business Jets division is making customization more streamlined.

The move would reduce the fees that banks receive when consumers shop with debit cards.

The companies expect the deal to close later this year.

S&P 500 closes almost unchanged.

Who thought working in a closet was a good idea, anyway?

Davis Polk said the potential hires were leaders of student groups that had issued statements condemning Israel. But it also said it was reconsidering because some of the students had said they didn’t authorize the letters.

The airline said in an internal memo that it would board economy passengers with window seats before others in economy to save time.

Dallas-Fort Worth’s office sector is still reeling from the pandemic, and Plano might be the epicenter of its struggles. 

The north Dallas suburb is home to four of the region’s top 10 largest office vacancies, totalling nearly 3.4 million square feet of available space, the Dallas Morning News reported. Those four buildings alone account for almost 5 percent of DFW’s 70 million square feet of office vacancies, which includes sublease space.

As of August, the office vacancy rate in Plano was 22.5 percent, compared to 18 percent in DFW overall. The West Plano-Upper Tollway area had 10.31 million square feet of empty space through the third quarter, trailing only downtown Dallas, which had 10.34 million square feet. 

“Approximately 33 percent – 19.5 million square feet – of direct space on the market is in blocks over 100,000 square feet, highlighting how large companies have shed space in light of remote/hybrid work,” Andrew Matheny, research manager at commercial property firm Transwestern and Costar, told the outlet.

The largest chunk of vacant space in DFW is in Plano’s former EDS Campus at 5400 Legacy Drive, where almost 1.6 million square feet is available and NexPoint Advisors is planning a $3 billion redevelopment into a 22-acre life sciences campus. 

Just a mile down the road, more than 1 million square feet is up for grabs at the former J.C. Penney campus. The next largest vacancies in Plano are at 5320 Legacy Drive and the newly opened Granite Park Six, combining for over 700,000 square feet.

Despite Plano’s struggles, developers remain bullish on the area, as 1.5 million square feet of office space is in the pipeline. Part of the problem in Plano — and downtown Dallas — is that many office buildings are old and outdated. Thus, developers are working to overhaul some of them, either converting them for other uses or renovating them into amenity-filled office environments, which have been the most sought-after corporate destinations in the post-pandemic landscape.

Elsewhere in DFW, some of the largest vacancies include roughly 730,000 square feet in Fort Worth’s former American Airlines headquarters and 589,000 square feet in downtown Dallas’ Fountain Place tower, where landlord Goddard Investment Group is adding a 13,000-square-foot private club.

—Quinn Donoghue 

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Throckmorton Partners may buy part of a Hilton hotel in Downtown San Jose for student housing.

An affiliate of the Mill Valley-based investor is negotiating a price for the shorter of two towers of the 805-room Signia by Hilton San Jose at 170 South Market Street, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported, citing a city memo. 

The seller would be San Ramon-based Eagle Canyon Capital, led by Sam Hirbod. The San Jose City Council was set to decide Tuesday, Oct. 17, whether to allow the hotel split.

If the sale goes through, the Signia by Hilton would operate in the north tower, now undergoing a renovation. The university would take the curving, 13-story south tower.

The California State University system, on behalf of San Jose State University, is looking at leasing the 264-room south tower to house students. 

Eagle Canyon listed the south tower, an annex to the 541-room main tower at the former Fairmont San Jose, last spring for an undisclosed price.

The deal with Throckmorton would give the university an option to buy the 264-room wing, according to the memo. Its ground floor now contains a cafe and a Morton’s steakhouse.

The school and university system haven’t reached a final agreement to lease the building, Charlie Faas, SJSU’s vice president for administration and finance, told the Business Journal.

A potential lease of the hotel tower is one answer to the problem of housing for San Jose State,  largely a commuter school. Nearly 42 percent of its students have housing insecurity, according to a 2021 survey.

The university plans to replace its on-campus Washburn Hall dormitory with two new ones with more than 1,000 beds. It also plans to replace an off-campus state office building with a 24-story tower at 100 Paseo de San Antonio with 1,000 homes for faculty, staff and graduate students.

The former Fairmont fell into bankruptcy and closed its doors in March 2021, saying business shutdowns and travel restrictions from the coronavirus pandemic had ruined its bottom line. 

An ownership group led by Hirbod used the bankruptcy to do more than reorganize the hotel’s crumbling finances. It ousted hotel operator Accor Management and replaced it with Signia by Hilton. It reopened in April last year, after a $65 million renovation.

During the pandemic, the Bay Area hotel market was ranked among the worst in the nation. Downtown San Jose, a market for business travel and conventions, was especially hard hit.

“We had one of the best-performing hotel economies in the country (pre-pandemic), and that travel has not come back to the levels we had hoped, and we’re not seeing any indicators in the foreseeable future that we are going to return to those levels,” Ben Roschke, vice president of research and strategic development at Team San Jose, told the city’s Economic Development Committee last month.

— Dana Bartholomew

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