Masterplan Is Back in Dallas Cothrum’s Hands
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The real estate consulting firm Masterplan has been a mainstay in Dallas for roughly two generations, and until about three years ago, it belonged to the well-known Cothrum family. Now, the brand is back in family hands.
Masterplan ran the gamut when it came to local development consulting, offering services related to permit-expediting, zoning, entitlements, lobbying, TABC licensing, and land use, with offices in Dallas, Frisco, Austin, Fort Worth, and Houston.
Dallas Cothrum, who in 2006 took over leading the company his father founded, sold the operation to New York-based CRE heavyweight Milrose Consultants in July 2022. But just a couple of months ago, he bought back part of the business and started flying his own flag again, albeit with a slightly different name: Masterplan Consultants, A Cothrum Company.
“We’re going to remain strategic partners with them, but the zoning group and I spun off and we’re back out on our own and prospering, I dare say,” Cothrum told CandysDirt.com. “I mean, we know the Dallas market.”
That’s no boast. Cothrum’s father William founded Masterplan in 1981 after serving eight non-consecutive years on the Dallas City Council representing neighborhoods in the eastern part of town. As the younger Cothrum likes to point out, there’s been a Cothrum or Cothrum employee at City Hall ever since doing development work.
“We’re a 45-year startup in some ways,” he said. “This is a new venture doing largely the same stuff with the same staff … A lot of the same people working on the same or similar projects for the same clients.”
Despite Masterplan Consultants having a somewhat narrower scope of services available, Cothrum thinks there will be plenty of work to get at, especially with all the underutilized office space and older retail properties in need of revitalization across D-FW. With regards to the former, he is of the school of thought that says the traditional office is dead.
“A lot of cities aren’t willing to give up on it. They don’t realize most people don’t want to go back to the office,” he said, explaining how the post-COVID office space market has gone bimodal with A+ on one end and a lot of junk on the other.
His own operations lean toward that drift away from the office, a reality that yields plenty of unleased square footage and a growing number of conversions to multifamily or mixed-use residential.
“We’re in the office three days a week for our core days, and even then all my people are in early and gone by 4 p.m. I don’t care, just get your work done,” he said. “I’ve adapted to it. If you want to be in the planning business and be an agent of change, you got to change with the times.”
Cothrum thinks the likely upcoming enactment of Senate Bill 840 will also open up considerable opportunities in Dallas, Fort Worth, and some of the metro’s suburbs. The bill would allow developers to bypass rezoning for multifamily and residential-heavy mixed-use on commercially-zoned land.
“It’s going to be big like gas drilling was. It’s going to be a growth driver, and we need one because I do think that things have sort of stalled,” he said. “It’s not that Texas hasn’t been doing okay, but this may give us a jump.”
He said that developers will still want to engage with communities and officials about zoning concerns, even if their projects can get their rezoning by right. And even if rezoning is off the table as the basis for a lot of negotiations over things like design and impact, cities will still want a say in those developments and may offer incentives to ensure a quality product gets delivered.
“I think it’s going to really change the landscape,” Cothrum said.
