A 33-story office tower at 2100 Ross Avenue in Downtown Dallas is headed to a foreclosure auction next month after its owner, Woods Capital, defaulted on the $98 million loan tied to the property. The 840,000-square-foot building, constructed in 1982 and renovated in 2014, sits in the Arts District at the center of a broader exodus of corporate tenants from Downtown office towers to newer developments in Uptown.
According to The Real Deal, Wells Fargo provided the financing behind 2100 Ross in 2016, and the tower is now scheduled for a foreclosure auction on October 6 in Dallas. Woods Capital, led by Jonas Woods, can still avoid the sale if it strikes a deal with Wells Fargo before that date. The auction is scheduled for October 6.
A Tower That's Changed Hands Before
This isn't 2100 Ross's first brush with foreclosure. Atlanta-based Cousins Property bought the tower out of foreclosure for $59 million in 2012, according to the seed report, then renovated it and leased it up to 90 percent occupancy before selling it to Thomas Dundon for $131 million in 2015. Dundon, who served as a board member of the Alliance of American Football, offloaded the property after the league collapsed in 2019.
The building's more recent slide began well before Woods Capital's current default. A credit rating evaluation by Fitch Ratings found occupancy at 2100 Ross had dropped to 60 percent by the second quarter of 2022 after anchor tenant CBRE — which had accounted for 15 percent of the building's net rentable area and 20 percent of base rent — vacated to relocate to Uptown. Three years later, insurance brokerage Lockton Companies, which had roughly 400 local employees at the tower, leased 100,000 square feet at Victory Commons One in Uptown and was expected to leave its major footprint at 2100 Ross early the following year, according to The Real Deal's February 2025 reporting.
The cumulative effect of those departures is stark. The tower's 843,728-square-foot footprint underscores the scale of its leasing challenge.
Downtown's Broader Vacancy Crisis
2100 Ross's troubles are unfolding against the backdrop of a Downtown Dallas office market in serious distress. Downtown Dallas office vacancy stood at nearly 27 percent, underscoring the market's distress — a crisis worsened by AT&T's announced plan to relocate to Plano, a move that will leave a hole of nearly 2 million square feet in the submarket, according to the seed report.
Not every Downtown property is struggling equally, though. The Arts District specifically has seen strong investment activity, with Regent Properties reportedly securing a $406 million conduit loan from Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley for the 50-story Trammell Crow Center, as reported by the Dallas Business Journal.
Uptown's Pull, and Woods Capital's Split Strategy
The price gap explains much of the tenant flight. Hall Structured Finance data for the first quarter of 2026 showed Uptown Dallas commanding average direct asking rents of $70.47 per square foot, compared with a broader Dallas-Fort Worth market average of $33.84 per square foot in Savills Q1 2026 data, per Capdex. Uptown's own availability sat at 23.8 percent, still well below the vacancy plaguing Downtown's older towers.
Same Company, Different Playbooks
Woods Capital has not been passive about Downtown's decline elsewhere in its portfolio. Through its subsidiary Pacific Elm Properties, the firm developed Santander Tower and transformed it into a mixed-use project combining apartments, offices, and a hotel — part of a strategy CEO Jonas Woods has explored involving the conversion of vacant office floors into residential units across Downtown, according to CoStar News. The firm has also planned conversions at Santander Tower and Bryan Tower that are expected to remove about 800,000 square feet of office space from the market.
But Pacific Elm's more recent energy has gone toward Uptown, not Downtown. The subsidiary is building Parkside Uptown, a 30-story, 500,000-square-foot project that will be home to Bank of America. Jonas Woods handed day-to-day leadership of Pacific Elm Properties to Billy Prewitt in 2025 while remaining CEO of Woods Capital overall, illustrating how the same ownership group is simultaneously chasing marquee Uptown wins while fighting to keep a 1980s Downtown tower out of foreclosure.
Whether Woods Capital can negotiate a resolution with its lender before the October 6 auction remains an open question, as does whether a winning bidder would pursue a residential conversion at 2100 Ross similar to the firm's other Downtown projects. The broader question of how widespread CMBS defaults across Downtown Dallas towers might ripple into local property tax assessments and the city's urban core revitalization efforts also remains unresolved.
