Texas Grocer H-E-B Buys Dallas Office Property

Beloved grocer H-E-B spent months seeking approval for its first Dallas store, but first it had to buy the land.

The San Antonio-based company overcame resident opposition rooted in concerns about traffic and flooding to secure zoning approval last week to build a 127,000-square-foot store at Hillcrest Road and LBJ Freeway.

But, H-E-B didn’t buy just land for the store. It bought a whole office campus. That office campus used to belong to Gerald Haddock’s Silver Star Properties.

In the first quarter, H-E-B purchased Commerce Plaza Hillcrest, a three-building office property at 12800-12890 Hillcrest Road, according to a report from Cushman & Wakefield. The 204,650-square-foot Commerce Plaza Hillcrest was built in 1972 and sits on nearly 10 acres. It was valued at $16.8 million in 2025.

The deal marks one of the region’s top office purchases of the year, but the purchase was the easy part for H-E-B, led by Chairman Charles Butt. The zoning fight was the challenge. Homeowner groups rallied against the project, calling the store “out of character” with the area. H-E-B prevailed, and the store is expected to open in 2028.

The transaction is a win for the Houston-based real estate investment trust, Silver Star Properties, which has been offloading its portfolio of Class B office properties as it attempts to right the ship amid a bitter proxy war with ex-CEO Allen Hartman.

Silver Star defaulted on a $259 million CMBS loan from Goldman Sachs in October 2023. Hartman was ousted the same year following accusations of nepotism and mismanagement. He denies the allegations.

Haddock spearheaded an effort to sell off Silver Star’s 35-property portfolio of low to mid-tier office properties and pivot to self-storage. It’s not been easy. A Silver Star subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in 2023. In August, the firm faced foreclosure on three office properties in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio backing a $57.8 million loan from Benefit Street Partners.

H-E-B has been on a different mission this year. It spent the year colonizing Dallas-Fort Worth’s northern fringe, buying land for stores in cities like Sherman, where it picked up 20 acres at the northwest corner of FM 1417 and U.S. Route 75 in June.