This Ritz Is Not OUR Ritz — Dallas Real Estate News

The Ritz Carlton Residence Sarasota

I’m doing something rather unconventional here. I am cutting and pasting in an entire story as I found it on the web. Read, please:

Texas Multimillionaire logs rare loss on Ritz Tower sale

Donald J. Carter recently sold a 3,700-square-foot condominium in the Ritz-Carlton Tower Residences for $1.25 million, or $64,000 less than he paid in June 2004.

But don’t worry about Carter.

The multimillionaire real estate investor and former majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball franchise has made out pretty well on his investments at the Ritz.

Carter, who made a fortune reselling commercial properties purchased after the savings and loan crisis, spent $49.5 million to buy 24 units in the Tower Residences during the 12 months after the building came out of the ground in 2003. His median purchase price was $1.96 million.

Since then, Carter has sold 21 of the units for just over $59 million and a median price of $2.5 million.
He still owns the 5,275-square-foot penthouse unit on the 18th floor that he bought $3.257 million.

Carter, well known for standing on the Mavericks’ sidelines wearing a cowboy hat, founded the expansion team along with Norm Sonju in 1980.

He put up the $12 million expansion entry fee, an investment that earned him about $125 million when he sold the team in 1996 to an investment group led by H. Ross Perot, Jr. Carter is now a minority owner.

After the Mavericks won their NBA championship earlier this month, it was Carter — not Mark Cuban, perhaps now the most prominent investor in the team — who accepted the trophy from Commissioner David Stern.

OK, tell me, do you read this and think we are talking the Ritz Carlton DALLAS?  Or rather, the Residences at the Ritz Carlron Dallas? I sure did, and thought I was slipping. I checked DCAD and saw that Donald Carter owns ZERO condos at the Residences at the Ritz Carlton Dallas.

This story makes it seem like the Ritz is putting condos on the Filene’s basement chopping block fire sale, which I know is not the case because I have personal knowledge of two sales. So I emailed Kyle Crews, who tells me Don Carter owns nada at the Dallas Ritz. Kyle contacts the writer who wrote the story an he says, oh we were talking about the Ritz Carlton Residences Sarasota, FLA, not Dallas. Now it may say that in a paper headline somewhere, but that little factoid did not make it onto the web story. So I was confused, and others were confused as well, and The Residences at the Ritz Carlton Dallas is asking the reporter for a retraction.

But then, since Carter’s made about half a million on the 21 units he has sold from his 24 unit inventory, maybe we should just pretend yes, this IS Dallas!