Community Engagement Is Key For Dallas Developer Matt Segrest of Alamo Manhattan

Developer Matt Segrest and his Alamo Manhattan firm can take a hostile crowd of Oak Cliff residents and turn that scenario into a standing ovation in six months’ time. 

How do they do it? 

The ethos that defines their team is based on several key traits: tough, professional, disciplined, absolute integrity, no ego, and always learning. They also don’t do anything halfheartedly. 

If you think it sounds like a U.S. Marine is helming the company, you’d be right. 

Stay Humble

Segrest, 49, started Alamo Manhattan in 2010 with his old friend Wade Johns, a comrade in the Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets where Segrest served as commander in 1994-95. 

“God has blessed this,” Segrest said, looking around his office building. “Somehow I wound up in a spot where my skills and talents lined up with the job demands. I really like it; it’s fun. And I work with great people.” 

Segrest lives in the Lakewood neighborhood of East Dallas, about 17 minutes from his Uptown office. He and his wife Jeanne have four children. His faith in God and his family — in that order — are the most important things in life, he says. Segrest is also pretty fond of his job. 

The land development process is like a conductor leading an orchestra, he explained. 

“You don’t play any instruments,” Segrest said. “You’ve got experts who do your strings and your percussion. The developer provides leadership and vision and we find the money to bring in. We don’t design it or do architecture or engineering. We hire a contractor to build it and we have a company that manages it, but we put it all together. We’re just blessed to have some really brilliant people who work here.” 

The work done at Alamo Manhattan is always the highest quality, Segrest said. 

“What we do, our efforts, our jobs — this is what we’re giving to the world,” he said. “If you give something to the world, it’s got to be good. Everyone on our team buys into that. There’s an element of resurrection in these projects. It’s the idea of taking something underutilized and creating something beautiful.”

Recent Projects

Alamo Manhattan has $805 million in completed projects, $285 million under construction, and $990 million in the pipeline. They are currently the largest multi-family developer in Portland, Oregon, and also have projects in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Nashville, and Bellevue, Washington.

They recently completed their first hotel, a Marriott, across the street from Alamo Manhattan’s Fairmount Street office building. They’ve also developed Monaco, Moda, Routh Street Flats, Victor Prosper, and Stella in Dallas. 

The Oak Cliff Gateway

Phase One of the Victor Prosper project in North Oak Cliff is the local project that earned the developer some street cred, as community meetings were held while they were seeking city approval for $11.25 million in tax-increment financing. 

Dallas is Dallas. People want to live here.

Matt Segrest, President, Alamo manhattan

“We went in and pitched ideas. We didn’t show any specifics about what we were doing, and there was kind of this neighborhood push-back,” Segrest said. “It was really hostile. Our approach to business is that we want to be humble. One of our ethos is ‘no ego.’ We don’t know everything, we don’t pretend to know everything, and we want to learn. We want to do developments that have a meaningful role.”

If they can’t sell a community on something, they don’t want to do it, the developer added. 

“So, on this project, we had a heated meeting, got a lot of feedback,” he said. “We went back and retooled it, changed the design that really fit the community. We went back and re-presented it again.” 

That second presentation got the folks at Alamo Manhattan a standing ovation. 

“We like to think it’s because we did it the right way,” Segrest said. “You don’t get angry, you don’t get defensive. You evaluate it and respond to it. Our goal is to do something that everybody is excited about.” 

The Victor Prosper project, in the eclectic Bishop Arts District, was “built like it was built 100 years ago,” Segrest said. 

“This is new construction, but we put a lot of effort into making it feel like the architecture connects to the Bishop Arts District,” he said. “People love that. We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on that. We built a big public plaza and a streetcar stop. For Phase II, we’re going to do the same type of architectural aesthetic. We’re working with the city and we’re going to extend the public plaza across the street. We want our deals to be hyperlocal. We want it to fit the neighborhood. We don’t do generic stuff. There’s a structure of a podium project, which is six stories, but we don’t have a standard template.” 

The COVID pandemic didn’t put any Alamo Manhattan projects on hold, nor did it change the floor plans of multi-family development under construction in this post-pandemic era, where many more people work from home. 

“We thought there would be a transition to people wanting one-bedroom dens because they would want a separate home office,” Segrest said. “What the data shows is that’s not true. It sounds good in concept, but people don’t want to pay for it.” 

What’s Next

Construction on a second phase of Victor Prosper — to include two buildings with 210 units in four levels of wood-framed construction above a concrete podium and subgrade parking garage — is slated to start next month. The second phase also adds more than 9,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. 

“We typically build to the top of the sub-market, so North Oak Cliff, the top of the market there is different than the top of the market downtown,” Segrest explained. 

Alamo Manhattan owns the land next door to its offices, which they recently rezoned for a 29-story apartment tower. They also have a site in Austin where they plan to break ground on a multi-family development next year, two new projects in Portland, Oregon, a Marriott in Nashville, and a hotel in Raleigh-Durham. 

Hotels are interesting from a development perspective, Segrest explained, because hundreds of rooms are being used by different people every night. When planning the Marriott on Fairmount, Alamo Manhattan again engaged the community, ultimately making the hotel lobby “a living room for Uptown.” 

“We wanted to make it hyperlocal, to feel like Uptown,” Segrest said. “We wanted to engage pedestrians, making it an exciting place to walk by. It’s for the community, not just for guests. Fifty percent of the guests at the bar and restaurant are locals.” 

Every development deal they’ve done has been an off-market deal, Segrest said. 

“Our company is good at finding sites,” he said. 

The market is “challenging,” Segrest added, with a spike in construction costs and rental rates. 

“It’s a challenging environment, but also, in the markets where we develop, people are moving here,” he said. “Dallas is Dallas. People want to live here. Our plan is to do business a certain way, to treat people a certain way, pursue a certain quality of projects, and execute them efficiently and as well as we can. If we control our process and do that well, good results will come.”