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Addison Airport lease solves problem for growing firm, city
The Dallas Morning News
Tuesday, 9/29/2009
by Terry Maxon, Staff Writer
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PlaneSmart Aviation, a company based
at Addison Airport, realized last year that it needed bigger facilities if it
wanted to keep growing.
About the same time, the city of
Addison and airport officials started looking for a tenant that would fix up a
highly visible property along Addison Road that had become an aging eyesore.
It turned out to be a marriage made
in heaven, or at least in Addison.
The result: PlaneSmart has leased
the property at 15841 Addison Road and now has room to grow for years, and
Addison will get a more attractive property at the highly visible site.
"I think it'll do a lot for the
image of the airport," said Patrick Rydzewski, PlaneSmart's director of
marketing. "As people drive up and down Addison Road, they just see this
old hangar and beat-up tarmac. After we're done, it's going to be beautiful. You'll never know anything old existed there."
PlaneSmart, an aircraft management
firm, will replace cracked asphalt at a
highly visible corner on Addison Road as part of its lease for larger facilities
at Addison Airport. The company has agreed to invest $500,000 in the property.
"Hopefully it'll be a long and
happy relationship for both of us," said Bill Dyer, Addison Airport's real
estate manager, who helped put the deal together.
PlaneSmart is a 6-year-old company
that offers aircraft management and fractional ownership of airplanes, mainly
single-engine Cirrus aircraft that are sold primarily in quarter shares and
half shares.
From its modest hangar at Addison
Airport, it makes sure that the aircraft in its small fleet get the necessary
maintenance, cleaning, repairs and piloting.
The company's current property at
4700 Airport Parkway, subleased from another company, had served PlaneSmart
well, but its small hangar and apron were limiting the company's ability to
expand, president and chief executive Michael Brosler said.
In summer 2008, PlaneSmart's current
landlord urged the company to buy the lease on the property.
Although PlaneSmart agreed to prepay
18 months of rent, the negotiations made the aviation company think about its
facility plans.
Meanwhile, Addison Airport was
pondering the future of the Addison Road property. Long occupied by Henley
Aviation, the property was taken over by Victory Jet in 2008 after Henley filed
for bankruptcy in October 2007.
Neither Henley nor Victory Jet was
able to invest much money in the outside area or the building itself, finished
in 1979, Dyer said.
"Victory Jet was an interim
owner in there, but he kind of got caught with the market downturn and just
decided it was too much for him to take on," Dyer said. "About the
time he came to that conclusion, PlaneSmart stepped into the picture here. It
was good timing all the way around."
PlaneSmart agreed to lease the
property for 40 years and make substantial improvements; it hopes to move in
December, when its current lease expires. The Addison City Council, owner of
the airport, approved the deal July 14. (The airport is privately managed by a
joint venture.)
"This is going to be a good
deal for the airport," said council member Blake W. Clemens before the
July vote. "We need something like that, particularly in that
corner."
The agreement provides that:
•PlaneSmart will tear out about
20,000 square feet of aging, cracked asphalt and replace it with new concrete.
•The company will replace an aging
chain-link fence with one built of brick and wrought iron along Addison Road.
•A parking area along the front of
the building will be rebuilt and beautified.
•The 12,000-square-foot building –
4,000 square feet of offices and 8,000 square feet of hangar space – will be
reskinned and remodeled.
Brosler said PlaneSmart has
committed to investing $500,000 in the property. "It'll probably be double
that," he said.
Dyer said other parties expressed
interest in leasing the Addison Road property.
"The issue, though, really was
that they were more of the maintenance type of facilities, and they're not
going to put the same kind of capital investment into the property as
PlaneSmart," Dyer said.
"The first-class impression is
very important to them. We knew it was going to take somebody who was really
committed to the property and really wanting to turn things around," he
said.
Brosler said the larger hangar at
the new site will allow PlaneSmart to handle bigger airplanes, and the
abundance of tie-down places along the property's east side next to Addison
Road should give PlaneSmart sufficient capacity to park aircraft.
In addition, "we're a Cirrus
training center, so we'll be able to push a lot of our training packages for
people who want to learn to fly or provide pilot services," Brosler said.
Next to the new PlaneSmart property
is a series of "T-hangars," small buildings for airplane storage.
PlaneSmart has an option to lease that land and build an 8,000-square-foot
hangar if it needs to grow that much.
When the project is done, "that
will significantly clean up a good chunk of the older portion of Addison
Airport, which is one of our long-term objectives here, to start redeveloping
Addison Airport," Dyer said.
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