Category: News and Events

GSL Welcome Group, LLC recently closed a $9,750,000 loan to refinance several of its industrial properties in the Greater Houston Area including Pasadena, Deer Park, and the North Houston Intercontinental Airport Area.

The new loan was arranged by Matt Franke and Travis Fite of Q10- Kinghorn, Driver, Hough & Co. of Houston, Texas with the Company’s correspondent lender, AVIVA Life and Annuity Company of Des Moines, Iowa. GSL Welcome Group was represented by Director of Finance, Ralph Fite.

An increase in sublease office space. Falling property values. Retailers in lock-down mode. “We’re looking at difficult circumstances for 2009,” Welcome Wilson Jr., president and CEO of GSL Welcome Group, said Friday at a commercial real estate forum hosted by law firm Boyar & Miller.

Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the Jamaica Beach’s groundbreaking.

Wilson on Saturday donated boxes of brochures, promotional materials and yellowed news articles documenting the city’s history, which began when $95 down could buy “year-round vacation fun,” and included the momentous discovery of an Indian burial ground.

Welcome Wilson Sr. was 30 when he and a group of future prominent Houstonians acquired the land that would eventually become Jamaica Beach on the west side of Galveston Island.

The property was seen as being so far from civilization that Galveston plumbers, electricians and roofers refused to do work there, Wilson said last week as the development marked its 50th anniversary.

“It’s a great, great day for Jamaica Beach today,” said Mayor Vic Pierson in his opening remarks at a news conference to announce establishment of a museum to display photographs and artifacts of the founding of the West Galveston Island city 50 years ago; and the first ten years of its history.

‘It was a very desolate spot right here on the West End of the Island,” said Welcome Wilson, Sr., one of a group of five University of Houston graduates who developed Jamaica Beach. Wilson now chairs the UH Board of Regents.