Greenway Plaza’s tenants make moves
Greenway Plaza, a relatively stable office complex along Southwest Freeway, is facing change.
Occidental Petroleum Corp. has put nearly 814,000 square feet of its Greenway Plaza office space on the sublease market, new market reports from Houston-area commercial real estate firms show.
And T-Mobile, a tenant for more than two decades, is relocating from one of the Greenway buildings into another property nearby.
The Houston office of NAI, a commercial real estate firm, made note of Occidental’s substantial office space offering in a report on Houston’s sublease
market.
The amount of sublease space across Houston grew last month, the company said, to 15.3 percent of all the available space on the market. That represents or 9.3 million square feet. Since October, sublease space has hovered between 14 and 16 percent.
Despite economic momentum across the region, upstream energy companies continue to “rightsize” their office space, commercial real estate firm CBRE noted in a report.
Occidental’s space is in the 5 and 3 Greenway Plaza buildings.
Earlier this year, the Houston-based oil and gas company said it was in talks to buy the former ConocoPhillips campus in the Energy Corridor. No final decision had been made, and Occidental had no comment Tuesday afternoon.
In another development at Greenway Plaza, longtime tenant T-Mobile is planning to relocate after 22 years to 4126 Southwest Freeway. Representatives of that building, formerly known as River Oaks Tower, announced the new lease with Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile on Tuesday.
The telecommunications company will occupy about 30,000 square feet in the 17-story building that will now be known as T-Mobile Tower. The company is moving from 2 Greenway Plaza.
T-Mobile will occupy 3½ floors in its new building.
“Our business has grown so much in Houston that we need more space,” Alisa Arner, vice president of T-Mobile’s South Central sales region, said in a statement. “We’re opening more stores, developing new leaders, expanding our network coverage and adding capacity, and all that takes an even bigger team.”
Doug Pack and Sam Hansen of Avison Young negotiated the lease for landlord Medistar Corp. The tenant was represented by Tami Pearson and Lindsay Pearson with Waterman Steele Real Estate Advisors.
Greenway Plaza comprises 11 office buildings surrounding the intersection of Richmond and Edloe, just north of the Southwest Freeway. A spokesperson from property operator Parkway could not be reached.