Despite its high profile, there are a lot of unknowns, including the occupancy rate of Sundance Square’s extensive retail space and the Basses’ long-term strategy.
FORT WORTH, Texas — This story was originally published by our content partners at the Dallas Business Journal. You can read the original version here.
Sundance Square is one of the best-known destinations in downtown Fort Worth. The area, covering 37 blocks, is home to iconic architecture and art, as well as lots of restaurants and bars and major offices for oil and gas companies and banks.
Country, salsa and other types of live music echo from the square on any given weekend. A towering, glittering Christmas tree stands taller than the one in New York City’s Rockefeller Center during the holiday season. It’s all owned by the highly influential married couple Ed Bass and Sasha Bass.
Despite that high profile, there are a lot of unknowns too, including the occupancy rate of Sundance Square’s extensive retail space and the Basses’ long-term strategy for the prime collection of properties. Several ground-level retail spaces sit empty, with no indication of if or when something new will fill them. Plus, in the past year numerous prominent tenants have departed, including an improv comedy troupe and a restaurant that had each been in their locations for decades.
That makes Sundance Square a point of curiosity for many in the Metroplex business community. But data about this large chunk of downtown Fort Worth is hard to come by, even for the real estate professionals who closely follow such things. In recent months, Dallas Business Journal has reached out to real estate pros and downtown businesspeople to create a portrait of Sundance Square today — and create a vantage point that could help readers understand what might come next.
By the numbers
Sundance Square encompasses 1.7 million square feet, according to info compiled by real estate firm CBRE using both internal data and third-party sources. The majority is office space at 1.1 million square feet. The biggest office users include oil and gas companies EOG Resources and Black Mountain Exploration as well as JPMorgan Chase.
On the hospitality side, Worthington Renaissance Hotel occupies a large amount of space. Apartments make up about 345,000 square feet of Sundance Square across 118 units.
The biggest retail tenants are AMC Theaters, The Cheesecake Factory, Hyena’s Comedy Club, P.F. Chang’s and Del Frisco’s Grille. CBRE did not provide vacancy rates.
Last year, multiple retailers left Sundance Square after their leases were not renewed — most of them departing from the same block along Houston Street. That included Four Day Weekend, Melt Ice Cream and Reata Restaurant. Just those departures left about 30,000 square feet of retail space empty, according to CBRE.
Plus, the 131-old Haltom Jewelers announced it was closing all of its locations, including a store in Sundance Square.
But the actual vacancy rate of Sundance Square’s retail space is not known. A 2024 survey by the Fort Worth Star Telegram found about a quarter of its storefronts vacant. The survey also determined it had the most occupied storefronts of any downtown area studied with 55.
Sundance Square management and Bryan Eppstein, a spokesman for Sundance Square, did not respond to phone calls and emails about vacancy, the overall vision for Sundance and plans to fill empty spaces.
The Basses’ strategy can be glimpsed in some of their public programs. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sundance Square management launched what it called the “Next Big Idea,” inviting small businesses to apply for retail space. That resulted in a variety of new businesses, including a plant shop, a music and clothing store and a purveyor of hand-crafted goods from Mexican artisans. The Star-Telegram reported in August that only two of the businesses in the program’s original cohort remained open under the same ownership, Cary O’Keefe and Colección Mexicana.
Barriers to data
So why is there such limited visibility into the state of Sundance Square, and what might that tell us about the future of the area?
Brokers told DBJ that Sundance space is typically not listed on popular sites such as Loopnet. Instead, they have to call Sundance Square’s leasing office to get a sense of what’s available.
“I think the traditional thought process on commercial real estate is if you have vacant space that you would like a tenant in, you want it listed everywhere that you could possibly imagine,” said Marshall Mays, a vice president with Colliers in Fort Worth. “To try to reach a potential tenant or make sure the brokerage community had complete access to what you have available. It’s unique that they kind of guard that information.”
Bill Kitchens, director of market analytics at CoStar Group, said retail vacancy is hard to pin down in Sundance Square because ground-floor retail space is included in the overall square footage of office buildings.
“We have faced some barriers in getting complete details for retail spaces,” he wrote in an email.
Kitchens said in the past few years, CoStar’s team has canvassed the area to identify vacancies. He said there may be some “shadow space” in Sundance — a space that may or may not actually be occupied by a tenant but that’s not available on the market.
“Sundance Square is a unique exception to the otherwise strong pulse we have on retail spaces,” Kitchens said. “With record low availability, competition for retail spaces remains high.”
Shane Smith, director of research at Downtown Fort Worth Inc., said he’s also limited on what info he can access about Sundance Square — sometimes he walks around to find out about new tenants.
“We just trust that whatever they’re doing is according to their own plans and their own agenda, their own idea,” Smith said.
There are signs that Sundance management continues to work quietly in the background. Stripes of paint varying in color decorate the walls of the building at 101. W. Third St., formerly occupied by Jamba Juice and a boozy snack bar called Hopscotch — suggesting a possible new paint job.
Pottery lines the walls of a building around the corner and “Sundance Clay” is printed on clear windows of the otherwise closed building.
But, because access to information about plans for Sundance Square is limited, visitors to the downtown area likely won’t know what’s filling space until an “open” sign is placed on the door.
