Lockton Place starts in Westchase
Eight-story office building is ‘more of an urban setting in a suburban environment’
Houston-based Triten Real Estate Partners broke ground on Lockton Place, an eight-story office building in Westchase named for its main tenant.
Lockton, a global insurance brokerage based in Kansas City, has leased 120,000 square feet on five floors of the 187,000square-foot building. It will relocate from San Felipe Plaza in the Galleria area.
Triten Real Estate Partners and its Triten IAG (International Alliance Group) affiliate will occupy a floor, leaving a portion of the first floor and the entire second floor available for lease. Triten IAG, which handles engineering projects for refineries and chemical plants, is also part of Triten Corp.
Ziegler Cooper Architects designed the glas- and-brick building, which is being built by Harvey.
The building at 3657 Briarpark is in a region where plenty of existing space is sitting empty as energy companies have merged and downsized. It’s on the same street at National Oilwell Varco, Schlumberger and Cameron, which is now part of Schlumberger.
Westchase has 1.1 million square feet of sublease space on the market, and the Energy Corridor farther west has 2.3 million square feet, according to commercial real estate firm Transwestern. The Houston area overall has 8.7 million square feet of sublease space.
The new building gave Lockton the chance to have input into the design as well as a high level of amenities, said Scott Arnoldy Jr., head of Triten Real Estate Partners. There will be a terrace at the back of the property, outdoor patio dining, and a fitness center and cafe on the ground floor, Arnoldy said.
“It’s more of an urban setting in a suburban environment,” he said. “It’s a jewel box, boutique project.”
Another unique aspect to the project is that a 1970s era building that was once head- quarters to Randall’s was torn down to make way for the new building. Triten moved out of that building and is subleasing space for its own offices from CGG in Westchase for two years.
The biggest blocks of available sublease space in Westchase, according to Transwestern, are: Pinnacle Westchase, where Phillips 66 has 198,425 square feet; CityWestPlace, where Statoil has 150,439 square feet and another 103,018 square feet; One BriarLake Plaza, where Apache has 98,388 square feet; and Two BriarLake Plaza, where Samsung Engineering has 58,916 square feet of excess space.
Lockton Place will be finished in December 2017, about the same time as Hines’ 1 million square foot 609 Main tower opens in downtown.
Regions Bank provided construction financing and USAA Real Estate Co. provided joint venture equity.
Triten Corp., which has several subsidiaries, has been in transition since selling its 70-year-old metal plating manufacturing family business several years ago. The recently formed real estate business has four projects totaling 700,000 square feet in Houston and Dallas.
katherine.feser@chron.com twitter.com/kfeser