AUSTIN, TEXAS — Adolfson & Peterson Construction has topped out the $90 million Forest Park Medical Center in Austin. Adolfson & Peterson is serving as the general contractor for the hospital, which is being developed by Neal Richards Group. The project is being built on an 8.5-acre site inside of a 59-acre master campus located near state highway 45 and La Frontera Boulevard in Williamson County. The 145,000-square-foot, four-story hospital will feature 46 private inpatient rooms, including 12 family suites, six intensive care rooms and 10 fully integrated operating suites. Also part of the development is an 80,000-square-foot medical office building and an 181,000-square-foot garage.
Texas
BAYTOWN, TEXAS — Exxon Mobil Corp. has begun construction on a chemical plant in Baytown, as well as begun expansion of a nearby plant in Mont Belvieu. The plants will use shale-derived natural gas to make plastics and other material. According to reports, the Baytown plant will be able to produce 1.5 million tons of ethylene per year. Exxon's plant is expected to be online by 2017. Bechtel, Linde, Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have been awarded contracts for phases of the two projects.
HOUSTON — Q10|Kinghorn, Driver, Hough & Co. has secured $3 million in permanent financing with a 20-year term for a group of 20 commercial condominium buildings made up of one- and two-story structures. The 93,000-square-foot complex, which is located just off of Highway 290 in northwest Houston, is 100 percent leased. Rudolph Ernst Krueger owns WWT International Inc. and was the borrower.
HOUSTON — TTS Marine Inc. has leased 14,560 square feet of industrial space at the Vickery Industrial Plaza, located at 14730 Vickery in Houston. Travis Land of NAI Houston represented the landlord, United Equities. Bruce Fehn of DTZ represented TTS Marine.
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Berkadia Commercial Mortgage has hired Lloyd Griffin as a vice president in the company’s Austin office. He will report to Senior Vice President and Branch Manager Brant Smith. Previously, Griffin served as regional director at Citi Community Capital. At Citi Community Capital, he originated and closed over $800 million in construction and permanent loans, tax exempt bonds credit enhancements, private placements and low-income housing tax credit equity placements. He also was vice president of the Affordable Housing Group at GMAC Commercial Mortgage.
DALLAS, TEXAS — Crescent has broken ground on its 530,000-square-foot McKinney & Olive project in Dallas. The development will include 480,000 square feet of office space and 50,000 square feet of retail space, including a coffee shop and three restaurants. Law firm Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP will lease 109,000 square feet and occupy four floors. Crescent will begin construction immediately, and completion is anticipated in summer 2016. The project team includes Crescent Real Estate Equities LP as developer; Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects as design architect; Kendall/Heaton Associates as executive architect; Office of James Burnett as landscape architect; and Beck Group as general contractor.
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Lucent Capital has arranged $29.25 million in permanent non-recourse financing secured by Met Center 10, a 345,600-square-foot Class A flex office building in Austin. The property was built in 2001 and is 100 percent occupied by two tenants: the State of Texas Department of Insurance and Pharmaceutical Product Development. The non-recourse loan enabled the borrower, a tenant-in-common investment group formerly sponsored by Breakwater Equity Partners, to refinance its existing debt and complete a structural upgrade program that remediated prior movement to the property’s foundation. The loan has a fixed interest rate of 4.85 percent for 10 years and includes a capital improvement holdback that will allow the borrowers to reconfigure a parking lot and create an additional 100 parking spaces for the tenants over the next several months. Challenges facing this transaction included the roll up of a tenant-in-common structure, special use build out, binary nature of the cash flow and recent structural property issues.
HOUSTON — Colvill Office Properties has closed an 11,574-square-foot office lease to Laredo Energy at CityCentre Four, a six-story, new Class A office building situated in the CityCentre mixed-use complex in west Houston. The signed deal completes lease-up of the entire 120,052-square-foot building, which is located at the corner of Interstate 10 and Sam Houston Parkway. Michael Anderson, Marilyn Guion and Connor Saxe of Colvill Office Properties represented landlord Midway in the lease transaction. André Granello and Gary Lawless of Cresa represented the tenant. Midway recently broke ground on CityCentre Five. The new 15-story building will add another 200,000 square feet of office product to the CityCentre development. Delivery is projected for summer 2015. The building will offer 18-foot ceilings on three of the floors and will include retail and restaurant space on the ground level.
CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS — Marcus & Millichap has arranged the sale of First Cash Pawn, a 10,611-square foot net-leased property located in Corpus Christi. Vincent Knipp and Chance Hales of Marcus & Millichap had the exclusive listing to market the property on behalf of the seller, a private investor. Knipp and Hales also secured the buyer, a private investor. First Cash Pawn is located at 2104 Morgan Ave., near Highway 286 also known as Crosstown Expressway. The building was constructed in 1942 and sits on two parcels totaling .8156 acres.
Austin is maturing as a commercial real estate market. Over the past few years, the city has witnessed an increase in institutional and foreign capital attracted to Class A office assets in the metro area. Most of the new investors in Austin are capitalizing on continued rental rate growth in the office sector, but is this growth sustainable? Austin’s overall office occupancy rate and rental rates have traditionally been a series of steep peaks and valleys, but will future growth be dictated by these historical trends? Tech Bubble Bursts Leading up to the burst of “tech bubble” in 2001, office leasing in Austin was in full swing, with an occupancy rate of 93 percent. Dun & Bradstreet ranked Austin as the top city for high-tech startups in 1999, and Angelou Economic Advisors estimates that more than 200 new companies were added to Austin’s roster of technology firms in that year. Austin companies secured an estimated $740 million in venture financing in the first three quarters of 1999, more than triple the funding placed in all of 1998. The absorption witnessed leading up to this bubble was phenomenal, but the growth was inflated by the source of the rental payments. These …