Who is Gillon Property Group’s Ray Washburne?

Gillon Property Group isn’t just a combination of assets; it’s a 21st century real estate reflection of legendary Texas oil wealth.

The firm will oversee the real estate holdings of Ray Washburne and his wife, Heather Hill Washburne, who is the daughter of A. G. Hill Jr., granddaughter of Margaret Hunt Hill, and great-granddaughter of legendary oil tycoon H. L. Hunt.

H.L. Hunt founded Hunt Oil Company after purchasing 5,580 acres of the 140,000-acre East Texas Oil Field, and his life story inspired the character J. R. Ewing on the show Dallas .

The Hunt family fortune is widespread, with Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, founded by Hunt’s daughter Caroline, among the higher-profile assets.

H.L.’s son Lamar Hunt, was instrumental in founding the American Football League, with ownership of a football team in Dallas that soon became the Kansas City Chiefs. And the AFL soon merged with the NFL, becoming half of the Super Bowl.

Today, the family is worth an estimated $25 billion.

Hill Washburne married Ray, a Southern Methodist University grad whose family hails from Chicago and includes Ray’s great-grandfather Hempstead Washburne, mayor of Chicago in the 1890s.

Washburne is best known for two things: buying the high-end outdoor mall Highland Park Village (along with his wife, her sister Elisa Hill Summers and Elisa’s husband Stephen) and co-founding Tex-Mex chain Mi Cocina.

The group purchased Highland Park Village in 2009 for $170 million and transformed it into a shopping destination for the who’s who of Dallas.

Today, it’s home to private, members-only club Park House, Dallas’ version of Soho House.

He’s also a player in the multibillion dollar transformation of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, a project that aims to revitalize the city’s downtrodden urban core.

Washburne purchased the nearby former Dallas Morning News building in 2019 for $28 million with plans to convert it to a mixed-use district, but threatened to sell it to a data center provider in order to flip the site to the city for over $50 million.

He’ll still be involved though he sold the property, as he also purchased the nearby Greyhound bus terminal in 2024. The station will close this fall, unlocking the redevelopment potential of the site.

A few miles north, Washburne is part of a supergroup cashing in on the luxury development of Dallas’ Knox-Henderson neighborhood. He’s partnering with Trammell Crow Company to develop Knox & McKinney, a 300,000, 12-story office building at 4544 McKinney Avenue.

Outside of real estate, Washburne is a Republican operative and fundraiser, serving in the first Trump administration as president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. He helped create the agency’s replacement, the International Development Finance Corporation, in 2018 and headed that organization until 2019.

He also has displayed political dexterity, going from finance chairman for former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s campaign to vice chairman of the Trump Victory Committee in 2016.

Politico reported that he met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — the former chairman of Newmark and Cantor Fitzgerald — during the most recent presidential transition to advise on Trump’s cabinet pick for head of the Energy Department.