WP Carey's Top Exec Picks Dallas for First US Office Outside NYC

DALLAS-With Texas as its largest territory, WP Carey & Co. LLC has turned on lights in its first US office outside the New York City headquarters. Ramping up the plan is a managing director and leading investment officer.

The corporate decision is part personal and part business, Anne Coolidge Taylor, an 11-year top exec who five years ago opened WP Carey’s London office. Taylor says the decision swung to Dallas, partly for its central US positioning. “You can travel anywhere in the country for a one-day trip,” she says. “More and more we were finding our acquisitions people were stopping in Dallas.”

The office was set up on the 13th floor of Building 200 at the Crescent in Uptown. For now, Taylor is soloing, but she’s planning to add at least one assistant and let the “deal volume and number of leads” drive the decision to add staff or rely on NYC resources for her net-lease acquisitions focus, she tells GlobeSt.com. In addition to being a managing director, she’s president of Corporate Property Associates 15 Inc., a three-year-old, publicly held, non-traded REIT managed by WP Carey.

This year, WP Carey has closed about $100 million in Texas: U-Haul International Inc. of Phoenix, 15 locations for $58.9 million; Huntsman Corp. in the Woodlands near Houston, $39.8 million; and Grande Communications Networks Inc. of San Marcos, TX, $1.4 million. In all, WP Carey owns 8.1 million sf in Texas and 1.4 million sf in Houston, the firm’s largest concentration in its global portfolio.

“Anne’s experience in opening our London office…and her experience as one of our top dealmakers makes her the ideal person to head our Dallas office,” William Polk Carey, chairman of the investment firm, says in a press release.