Duncanville High School south of Dallas has produced graduates who are such talented football players they are standouts in the NFL. Now that success has drawn something else: a New York-based investor who bought an apartment complex across the street from the school’s football field.
Ashcroft Capital acquired Birchstone Cedar Ridge, a year-old multifamily property in a bet that families will keep moving there so their children can be in the football program. Former students include two-time Super Bowl champion and NFL legend Ray Crockett, former Pittsburgh Steelers running back Barry Foster, and Super Bowl winner and current defensive tackle for the Las Vegas Raiders Adam Butler.
“The football team is incredible,” Ashcroft Founder and CEO Frank Roessler said in an exclusive interview. Ashcroft and other investors tend to favor the wealthier suburbs north of Dallas for apartment purchases, but Birchstone Cedar Ridge’s newly built status and its proximity to Duncanville High School made it an attractive investment, Roessler said.
Duncanville’s football team, 11-1 so far this year, plays a semifinal game Saturday that could get it to the state championship in a division that’s made up of the largest Texas high schools by enrollment. Duncanville’s football program is considered a national powerhouse, sending recruits to the top college football teams — and some of its games are broadcast nationally. Duncanville made it to the state championship five times since 2018, winning back-to-back titles in 2022 and 2023.
“A lot of NFL players and Hall of Famers went to high school there, and it draws families to live in the school district if their children are interested in football,” Roessler said. The Birchstone Cedar Ridge apartments were nearly fully leased at the time the deal closed, Roessler said.
Ashcroft acquired the 360-unit apartment complex at 6165 Ridge Center Drive in South Dallas in November through a joint venture with two Chicago-based investors, Pearlmark Real Estate and Temerity Strategic Partners.
Terms weren’t disclosed. The property, with one-, two- and three-bedroom units, was last valued for the Dallas County tax rolls at nearly $56.4 million.
To be clear, it’s not unusual for parents with children who have exceptional sporting ability to move to be near schools with highly rated programs. But in this case, the proximity of the new complex across from the football field and high demand from renters stand out as a stark example.
Unique purchase
Roessler said bringing out-of-state partners into the South Dallas neighborhood, an area not typically sought after by real estate investors, would normally be a tough sell. But, after driving through the market and inspecting the property, the deal made a lot of sense for the price the firm was targeting and landed on, he said.
“As we talked to residents, it was clear that a big reason why people lived there was for the football program,” Roessler said.
The purchase “could be a hard sell” for investors who don’t know the market well, but Ashcroft’s joint venture partners in the deal “have an amount of trust in us, and we are getting this at a very low price.”
Renter demand at the apartments also won over the joint venture partners, Roessler said.
Roessler, like families in the apartment complex, knows firsthand about moving to an area for an opportunity. He founded Ashcroft in New York City in 2015 and moved to Dallas just before the pandemic to set up the firm’s in-house property management company called Birchstone Residential.
He and his wife, who were just starting a family around that time, fell in love with Dallas and decided to make it their primary residence.
The CEO regularly travels to New York City to oversee the multifamily investment firm’s business. Ashcroft owns properties in Texas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina and is pursuing additional Sun Belt markets.
For potential deals next year, Ashcroft plans to target other “good real estate,” Roessler said. In addition to apartments that have a built-in draw like the football program for Birchstone Cedar Ridge, the properties could include early 2000s-era real estate that Ashcroft can fix up with its construction management division.
“That allows us to add a unique value that we bring to opportunities,” Roessler said. Ashcroft’s investment strategy also includes buying newly built properties at a discount. “We want to grow our assets under management, and right now, we are finding a good opportunity to buy beautiful properties at a very good price with cash flow and putting fixed debt on them,” he said.
Wave of new supply
In the Dallas-Fort Worth region, the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan area, the multifamily pipeline is at a decade-low level after the region was hit by a wave of new supply, CoStar’s Market Analytics Director Bill Kitchens said in his latest market report. That has caused vacancy to spike to 12%, the report said.
Those demographics make the Birchstone Cedar Ridge’s high occupancy stand out all the more, even in a metropolitan area that’s relatively strong.
Despite the influx of new apartments in North Texas, Roessler said, the market has shown “disproportionate resilience,” compared with other U.S. markets that Ashcroft considers for investment. For example, Atlanta is “very soft right now” with roughly the same amount of new apartment supply hitting the market that the Dallas-Fort Worth region experienced, he added.
“It’s just a weaker market, with rents in Atlanta having declined more than in Dallas,” Roessler said. “Dallas has marginal, but positive, rent growth projected for 2026.”
While other potential property purchases may not be such an occupancy win as the Birchstone Cedar Ridge complex near a proven draw like a nationally known football program, real estate in the Dallas market is still a “big green yes” for acquisitions, with Houston also being appealing for the firm, he said. In Florida, the Orlando area and the state’s north central market are real estate all-stars and attractive for potential deals, Roessler said.