BY STEVE BROWN | DALLAS MORNING NEWS | – International accounting firm KPMG LLP confirmed Wednesday that it’s relocating its 1,300 downtown Dallas employees to a new office tower planned in the Arts District.

KPMG has rented more than 150,000 square feet in the 16-story Hall Arts Center building to be built on Flora Street across from the Meyerson Symphony Center.

Hall Financial Group will begin work on the tower in September — the first downtown office building started in eight years.

KPMG will make the move to the building in mid-2015 when it relocates from the KPMG Centre. The company has had its offices in the Harwood Street building since 2001.

“I cannot think of a better way to mark 100 years of KPMG’s presence in Dallas than with a new office space in the Arts District that renews our commitment to this flourishing area of downtown Dallas,” Manny Fernandez, KPMG’s managing partner in Dallas, said in a statement.

KPMG looked at multiple locations in downtown and Uptown before picking the Arts District location. Jones Lang LaSalle’s Carl Ewert and Stephen Holley negotiated the lease transaction with Hall Financial Group’s Kim Vincent Butler.

Developer Craig Hall took out a building permit for his project late last year.

The new metal and glass high-rise was designed by HKS Inc., and Turner Construction will be the general contractor.

Texas Capital Bank is financing the project.

“I would have gone ahead and built it” without a lead tenant, Hall said. “The KPMG deal came up after we had made the decision to go ahead.

“They are a fabulous tenant to have in the building.”

The planned office tower is one of two buildings Hall hopes to construct on top of the underground parking garage at Flora and Crockett streets on the north side of downtown. A taller condominium tower is planned as a later phase of the development.

With the parking garage already in place, Hall Financial had an edge on other developers who are trying to get buildings out of the ground in the downtown area.

“We save about six months because of the parking,” Hall said. “We can only take one more large tenant in the building, and a number of 25,000- to 50,000-square-foot tenants are starting to call us.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/business/commercial-real-estate/headlines/20130417-kpmg-moving-to-craig-halls-new-arts-district-tower-in-downtown-dallas.ece