Close Up With John Pruitt

Cassidy Turley executive managing director John Pruitt is a self-proclaimed zealot for the Allen Center, which he leases for Brookfield. (You don't choose your passion, it chooses you.) Memorial Resource Development must’ve caught his signature enthusiasm—it just inked 125k SF to move into the complex.

John says he always knew Allen Center was a great property, but he didn’t really catch the fever until his firm moved its offices there in June. Now he feels it’s the best complex in the CBD, thanks to its productive atmosphere, nearby amenities like the Downtown Club at the Met, and quick access to 45 and Allen Parkway. Not many more companies will get to benefit from it—John tells us Allen Center is 95% occupied overall with only one full floor available.

John (here between client TIER REIT’s Kmeal Winters and his partner Jessica Ochoa) is well-versed in Downtown—he started his career there in 1985, leasing buildings for Coldwell Banker. Since, he’s gotten to lease many of Houston’s iconic buildings across town, like Marathon Oil Tower. That’s where he worked his hardest deal ever, unwinding Marathon’s long-term master lease into a traditional lease. John tells us it took two years of negotiations with Cushman & Wakefield’s Tim Relyea and Scott Wegmann to get it done. It was a very detailed transaction, and no one had done a deal like it before.

Here’s John with his wife of 25 years, Patty, and their two kids at daughter Hannah's graduation from Trinity University. (Now she's followed dad into commercial real estate, joining American Campus Communities in Austin, while son John just started at TCU.) John’s favorite part of real estate: The exhilaration of being around big pools of capital and big office buildings. When it’s time to unwind, John’s all about golf and guitars. He has more than two dozen guitars—his favorite is a 1946 Martin acoustic—and it’s on his bucket list to play Pebble Beach and St. Andrew’s.