Mehrdad Moayedi is honoring the late co-founder of Mary Kay cosmetics with a multifamily conversion project involving the company’s former headquarters.
Moayedi’s Farmers Branch, Texas-based Centurion American filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to convert Optima Business Park, a pair of office buildings at 8787 North Stemmons Freeway, into a 176-unit multifamily complex.
He’s calling the project “The Founder” as a nod to the property’s history, he told The Real Deal. Co-founder Richard Rogers, who started the company in 1963 with his mother Mary Kay Ash and siblings, died at age 82 on Tuesday. The property served as the company’s headquarters until it moved to a 33-acre campus in Addison, which it might sell.
Centurion estimates that the project will cost $43.1 million, and it plans to start construction this August and complete the project by April 2028, according to the filing. The construction cost amounts to about $244,700 per unit.
Moayedi secured historic tax credits for the project, which will provide a $15 million boost, he said. The office buildings were constructed in 1976.
Office-to-resi conversions are usually structurally difficult, but “because of the way it sits, you can have windows in all of the apartments,” Moayedi said.
The larger building stands eight stories tall and spans 109,945 square feet, according to public records. The smaller building is five stories tall and has a total area of 101,455 square feet.
The property currently belongs to the Dallas-based Ricchi Group, with which Centurion has previously partnered. The Ricchi Group sold Centurion the historic Statler Hotel in 2014, according to public records. Centurion renovated the building into the Statler Residences, a condo-hotel that opened in 2016.
The property has also been at the center of an international fraud scheme involving Miami businessman Mordechai Korf.
Korf, who owned the property until 2019, was accused of laundering money from a Ukrainian bank through the office complex. The U.S. Department of Justice claimed in a 2022 civil asset forfeiture suit that Korf and his associates embezzled funds from PrivatBank and used them, “among other ways, to improve and maintain real property located at 8777 and 8787 North Stemmons Freeway in Dallas,” the suit reads.
Korf countersued, accusing the federal government of violating the Freedom of Information Act. Proceedings are ongoing.
Ricchi paid about $6.5 million for the towers in 2019, according to the DOJ.The Texas legislature passed a bill last year intended to facilitate residential conversions in commercial areas in some cities, but the legislation has been met with opposition from local governments in the Dallas area.
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