Just heard that this morning. If true, could it simply be that they don't have the banking volume to justify branch expenses, or that Jeff Records & Aubrey McClendon are about to strike a deal on the sale of the building, and the bank's lease was being brought to an end?

Midfirst getting involved makes no sense bc they need more office space, not less, and their flagship branch on Western is already pretty nice.

It doesn't involve MidFirst's operations. They have a new retail branch just a few blocks south, and their Plaza branch is around the corner on the I-44 service road. It's more of a personal deal involving Jeff Records, MidFirst's CEO, who also owns the building occupied by Flip's.

Aubrey McClendon has always wanted those two locations, but they've never struck a deal. So with BofA moving out, it makes me wonder if a deal is about to be announced regarding the Nichols Hills Bank tower.

The only way I see the property being sold is to McClendon personally, rather than to Chesapeake Land Co. which is the entity that owns all of NH Plaza and most of what surrounds it.

It's clear the new CHK board has curtailed superfluous spending but Aubrey may be proceeding with his own funds.

Maybe he'll end up buying NH Plaza so he can proceed with his vision?

I asked about this elsewhere because I didn't understand if Chesapeake money was bankrolling Aubrey's "visions" or if he had any personal stake in these projects. Does Aubrey still have enough money to buy NH Plaza and complete it?

Aubrey has a ton of assets (literally thousands of acres of land in and around East Edmond and a bunch of other stuff) but in the recent past he has been highly leveraged, borrowing against his well participation futures in order to finance drilling and other investments.

I'm sure he's worth a bunch on paper but it's probably also true he's leveraged to the hilt. So, not sure what he could pull off.

I do know Chesapeake Land has invested more than $70 million in the NH Plaza properties and the current assessed value is less than half of that.


But something certainly seems to be brewing in that area, as the old rug shop (on 63rd just west of Western) was recently demolished and when I was in town in October, I went inside the Glenbrook Centre West building and every single tenant was gone; that happened in just the last few months.

There had been a lot of talk about expanding the Triangle at Classen Curve and putting a hotel near the demolished Glenbrook Centre East building, but nothing has happened there in quite a while and there is still a big chunk of empty space next to Anthropologie. Also, the approved plans to expand Classen Curve seem to be stalled, as does the proposed project at NW 50th & Western.


I would suspect the new board will strongly curtail all this land acquisition and development, so I don't know what that means for the hundreds of millions they already own that are in no way associated with their core business. I suspect we'll see some of these properties on the market in the near future.