Six Office Buildings That Didn't Break Ground in 2014
2014 has been an incredibly busy year for office development, and we're going into 2015 with 17M SF still in the dirt. But not everything went as planned. We tracked down six projects that didn’t break ground as expected.
In February, Crescent announced its plans for 6 Houston Center—30 stories and 600k SF Downtown. Balfour Beatty was brought on as GC, and it was originally slated to break ground in summer. That became September/October, but it still hasn’t hit the dirt. The development is still on, though.
GenCap’s Five Chasewood Park (235k SF) has had a number of delays—it was originally planned to deliver in 2012. But after fully pre-leasing to Swift Energy in mid-2013, it seemed the project really would break ground this year. But then Swift’s stock took a hit and it put real estate on the back burner. Transwestern’s David Lee handles leasing for Chasewood and tells us GenCap is ready to start construction when it locks in a new anchor tenant.
Peloton announced plans for Westcreek Centre in February—the 21-story, 368k SF development was supposed to be the first office in 34 years built on the inside of 610 in the Galleria submarket. It was slated to break ground in Q4 right next to the River Oaks District, but the land never closed, and the deal is dead. (Multifamily buyers drove land prices too high for office.)
Patrinely and USAA planned to break ground on two Class-A office towers totaling 440k SF in Springwoods Village’s CityPlace this year. That won’t happen--the developers are just making sure everything is lined up to fire on all cylinders--it's a big project with lots coming online at once. Groundbreaking is now set for January.
Williamsburg Enterprises and Transwestern had a four-story, 125k SF Class-A office planned on Sam Houston Parkway. Transwestern’s David Baker was pegged to lease it, but sources tell us the deal is dead.
In June 2013, Chevron announced it would develop a 1.7M SF, 50-story tower Downtown, its third in the submarket. The firm got a lot of help from the city and state for the project, including a $12M grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund and a 10-year property tax abatement from the City of Houston. The latter required Chevron break ground in 2014, and Chevron originally set the date for Q2. By December 2013, though, the project had been put on hold. (It may still get its abatement.) Chevron insists the deal will get done. Will we see this come back to the table in 2015?
