Sasha and Ed Bass Hand Off Retail Leasing at Sundance Square

Almost everyone who’s worked in the service industry in Downtown Fort Worth has a horror story about Sasha Bass.

She and her husband, Ed, the great-nephew of wildcatter Sid Richardson, own the 35-block swath of downtown known as Sundance Square. Since taking control of the district in 2019, their stewardship has been roundly criticized and sparked countless rumors.

The most pungent one (which got a mention in a 2022 Fort Worth Business Press article) involved a box of dog excrement that was dropped off at longtime downtown tenant Haltom Jewelers.

Most of the 149 comments on a Facebook post about another Fort Worth Star-Telegram story on Sasha Bass include something to the effect of: she ruined Downtown Fort Worth. The list of downtown restaurant obituaries is long: Reata, Simply Fondue, 3rd Street Market, Paco’s Mexican Cuisine, Revolver Taco, Melt Ice Cream and Arcadia Coffee.

In 2024, about 25 percent of the district’s storefronts were vacant, a Star-Telegram survey found. Affected tenants claimed rents were raised to what many of them deemed to be untenable levels. Rents included fees for marketing work that never seemed to materialize.

“The existing tenants, I call us survivors now,” Dr. Marie Holliday, a Fort Worth dentist, told WFAA in 2022 when Reata announced its exit from Sundance Square.

It must be noted that the seven-year reign of Sasha and Ed includes the pandemic, which hit downtown hard. But, it also must be noted that this is a town that hasn’t stopped bragging about how little the pandemic affected business.

Sasha and Ed seem to have finally taken the criticism of their stewardship to heart, because they recently handed off retail leasing to JLL, the brokerage announced on Monday. For real estate developers and investors who aren’t the Basses, it might be a welcome step away from the small-town tribalism that’s long governed Downtown Fort Worth.

The news comes a few months after the pair tapped LanCarte Commercial Real Estate to handle office leasing.

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