Dallas Developer Poorvesh Thakkar’s Track Record

It’s been a month of extremes for Poorvesh Thakkar.

The India-born, Dallas-based developer was slapped with a lawsuit trying to eject him from a Midtown Manhattan office building he bought in 2024.

The legal challenge comes amid unseasonably sunny days for Thakkar, who recently reached a milestone in his Mustang Square development. That’s notable, because, despite launching his real estate development company in 2016, his development chops are still largely untested, as his pitched projects have mostly been delayed or aborted.

Thakkar recently sold a 3.5-acre slice of the mixed-use project in Plano to an entity tied to Carrollton-based Madewell Spaces. The buyer said its plans to build 13 “standalone luxury office condominiums. D.R. Horton bought a swath of homesites at the project.

Thakkar claims the project is “almost fully sold out and developed.”

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the project, because Thakkar’s legal trouble in New York seems more indicative of his success as a developer than this Plano project.

The saga of the Midtown Manhattan office tower starts with an almost incomprehensible bet on the part of Thakkar:The largely untested developer struggling to get projects off the ground in his hometown of Dallas bought an office building in New York City with plans to turn it into a residential property, a tricky maneuver even for a seasoned developer.

The only thing that can explain the move is the price tag. Thakkar bought the 23-story building at 135 West 50th Street on auction site Ten-X for $8.5 million, a 97 percent discount to its 2006 sale price.

Safehold, which owns the land beneath the building, claims Thakkar’s firm failed to pay $9 million in property taxes that were due Jan. 1, 2025, and has since racked up almost $28 million in unpaid taxes, interest and other penalties.

After Thakkar failed to meet repeated extension deadlines and forbearance agreements, Safehold notified the firm that it was terminating the ground lease and demanded it surrender the building, according to the lawsuit. Thakkar refused to vacate the property, and the land owner is now seeking their immediate ejection, according to the complaint. He dug his heels in further with a countersuit in which he claims the ground landlord iced him out of his planned conversion project.

Thakkar could win his case in New York and completely sell out Mustang Square and he’ll still face question marks as a developer, thanks to the litany of lawsuits he’s faced, with allegations ranging from loan defaults to EB-5 fraud. The legal trouble appears to have peaked with real estate offering fraud charges filed by the SEC in February.

Austin’s Ayn Rand Museum

In case you missed Elon Musk’s recent embrace of Austin, the summer isn’t the only thing that’s hot in Austin. So is libertarianism. As war-tech startups set up camp in nearby Proto-Town, libertarian icon Ayn Rand is getting a museum built in her honor. The foundation dedicated to preserving the manuscripts of the Russia-born philosopher famous for her “Objectivism” theory is building a $30 million monument to Rand in the form of a library, exhibition room, office and “higher education classroom spaces.”

Fifth Third ditches Downtown Dallas

Dallas’ beleaguered downtown is still smarting from the news that anchor tenant AT&T is moving to Plano. To add insult to injury, Fifth Third Bank is ditching downtown, too, after its merger with Comerica Bank. Fifth Third is leaving a 200,000-square-foot vacancy in Comerica Tower. While the Ohio-based bank won’t settle into the still-under-construction site at 8300 Douglas Avenue until late 2028, it will leave its 200,000-square-foot lease at the 60-story Comerica Bank Tower at 1717 Main Street before the end of the summer.