Commercial Real Estate Summit: Urban projects need local backers

By : Kathryn McNutt//The Journal Record//October 1, 2025

Summary:

– Summit panelists urged patience and long-term partners for Edmond growth.

– Projects like The Townsend and The Ember highlight urban infill demand.

– Local capital and regulatory reform seen as keys to thriving communities.

EDMOND — Building lasting communities where people can thrive requires patience and the right financial partners, experts at the 2025 Commercial Real Estate Summit said Wednesday.

“The built environment is the human habitat,” Austin Tunnell, founder and CEO of Building Culture, said during a panel discussion on urban development. “What we are fighting for is options for people that lead to a better human habitat that lead to … ultimately more human thriving.”

Tunnell and Matthew Myers, founder of Switchgrass Capital, are partnering on The Townsend, a mixed-use development just south of Sprouts in downtown Edmond. The one-acre site will have 18 townhomes for sale, two live-work units with a loft above commercial space and 10,000 square feet of commercial, co-working and micro retail space.

Myers also is developing The Ember, a pocket neighborhood of 23 one-, two- and three-bedroom homes at the northwest corner of Ninth Street and Boulevard.

The Townsend, a mixed-use townhouse project being built on one acre in downtown Edmond, is an example of an urban infill development. Project partners talked about it during a panel discussion on urban design Wednesday at the 2025 Commercial Real Estate Summit. (Rendering courtesy City of Edmond)

These kinds of urban infill projects can take longer to complete than traditional developments, but the developers say they are worth it.

“What we’re trying to do is build projects that will stand the test of time,” Myers said. “There’s naturally going to be tension between building something of high quality versus the merchant build, which is build it fast, build it cheap and sell it as quickly as you can to maximize your IRR (internal rate of return).”

Eddie Coates, co-founder of Canvas Architecture & Development, said it’s important to find the right capital partners that can get behind the business plan to build something enduring that people will be proud to have in their community.

The supercharged growth in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has resulted in some bad outcomes where capital came from outside investors “looking to just harvest returns,” Coates said.

Developers need to look for partners who have “a scorecard that’s not just financial return maximization. If that’s the only thing on your scorecard and everything else falls by the wayside, you’re often going to have regrettable outcomes for your community.”

For Myers, who focuses on 10 square blocks of downtown Edmond, the right equity partners generally are residents of Edmond.

“Local partners both on the debt and equity side are really important,” he said. “We try to find lenders that will take the time to understand the project.”

Doing these types of projects with somebody who is not local is prohibitive because they don’t understand the local environment and culture, Myers said. “They have to care that we’re trying to build something that’s going to look good in 50 years.”

Tunnell said he came to Oklahoma City in 2020, so he doesn’t have the large local network the other two have.

“For me, raising capital locally was kind of hard because nobody knows who I am, but what I did have is a social media following,” he said.

Tunnell used that to promote projects and raise money from people he didn’t know who liked what he was putting out there, the work he was doing and why he was doing it. “I think there’s tons of people out there that want to participate in building something good or even great,” he said.

Myers said more than financing, the biggest challenge for him has been working with city staff.

“In the city of Edmond, a lot of the code is written for suburban neighborhoods, so that doesn’t fit with what we’re doing.”

Coates said urban infill developers have been looking for ways to overcome regulatory hurdles that have made denser, walkable neighborhoods difficult to build.

There currently is momentum around regulatory change in areas like density and minimum lot sizes, he said.

States like Texas and Tennessee have passed legislation “that I think is going to open some doors for better community building, better development,” Coates said.

“I’m hopeful to be involved with some state leadership on the legislative side to help bring some of those things, when they’re right, forward here locally.”

Tags: business, Edmond, The Ember, Real Estate, Switchgrass Capital, Commercial Real Estate Summit, Eddie Coates, Canvas Architecture & Development, Matthew Myers, The Townsend