Cousins Buys Uptown Dallas Trophy Office Property From Kaizen

Cousins Properties set a record for Dallas-Fort Worth’s biggest office trade of 2025 on North Texas’ hottest day of the year.

The Atlanta-based firm paid $218 million for the Link at Uptown, at 2601 Olive Street, according to a release from Newmark, which arranged the sale. The deal works out to $747 per square foot for the 292,000-square-foot building.

Newmark’s Chris Murphy, Robert Hill, Gary Carr and Austin Sheahan set up the deal with seller Kaizen Development Partners.

The 25-story Link at Uptown was built in 2021. Kaizen put it on the market in 2023; it was nearly fully leased at the time, the Dallas Morning News reported.

The sale marks the area’s biggest office transaction of the year, surpassing the record set by the Sterling Plaza earlier this summer. Shorenstein bought the Preston Center building from KBS with plans to renovate it.

The sale demonstrates the enduring influence of the flight-to-quality trend in the office market.

Companies are trying to lure their remote employees back to work with well-positioned office space that has high-end amenities. That’s made trophy office properties in strong submarkets the envy of investors. And, rightfully so — the rents these properties are fetching just keeps rising.

Trophy assets are raking in more than $100 per square foot gross, according to JLL.

While office markets in suburbs like Plano and Frisco have gotten attention for their role in boosting the greater market, Uptown is still one of the most sought-after submarkets in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. It stands to benefit from the built-to-suit projects in the pipeline for Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs that are being developed by KDC and Hunt Realty.

Despite the strength of these pockets of the market, the overall office vacancy rate in DFW remains high, at 27.7 percent thanks to empty space in office properties built in the ’80s and ’90s, according to JLL.