BOMA Top Office Building of the Year: 5 Houston Center
This weekend, teams pitted against each other in fierce competition, vying for a trophy and record-breaking stats. We’re talking of course about BOMA’s TOBY (The Office Building of the Year) awards. We were on hand to see which properties took top honors.
The big winner was 5 Houston Center—besides moving onto the regional competition in the 500k to 1M SF category, the 27-story property was named best of the best in the local showdown. (The newly created award recognized the best entry to this year’s competition across categories.) We snapped the team, led by Columbia Property Trust’s Kelly Wheeler (holding the trophies). Her staff has a combined 100 years of industry experience. The 581k SF building was built in ’02 and purchased by Columbia in ’05. It’s LEED Gold and known for its programs encouraging community involvement, like hosting tenant blood drives and note-writing to deployed military members.
Houston BOMA is a real powerhouse—we’ve got the most international TOBY wins of any chapter. We’re sending four other winners to the regional competition (in Tulsa in April) and hopefully all the way up to the international level: Heritage Plaza in the >1M SF category, the Houston Permitting Center (we snapped the team above, which took the Earth award), One Oak Park (100k SF to 250k SF category) and Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Plaza 4 (MOB).
