From leasing pickle to offering pickleball
Howard Hughes Corp. is updating tower to bring fun once workers return
Howard Hughes Corp. is looking for new neighbors in its headquarters building in The Woodlands.
The 31-story building, known as 9950 Woodloch Forest Tower, was built to expand Anadarko Petroleum’s headquarters campus in 2014, and emptied out after Occidental Petroleum bought Anadarko in 2019.
Hughes, which relocated its headquarters to the property from Dallas last year, is now intent on repopulating the building, focusing on adding amenities and repositioning the 600,000-square-foot tower for tenants of all sizes. One focus was the existing two-story gym and basketball court, features that would be expensive to replicate in a typical commercial office building.
“We’ll add pickleball to the basketball court,” said Jim Carman, president of the Houston region for Hughes.
Carman sees the addition, once workers return to the office, as a way for employees to take a break, get some exercise and socialize to break up the work day. Pickleball, which combines elements of tennis, badminton and ping-pong, is popular in retirement communities and YMCA
facilities.
Tenants can access a 33,000square-foot rooftop terrace with shaded seating areas and WiFi. The space, which is maintained by a solar-powered robot lawnmower, is large enough for events such as socially distanced family movie nights. In the lobby, a coffee bar is being built out. The building is near Interstate 45 and The Woodlands Mall.
Hughes occupies portions of two floors in the building for both its corporate office and the regional office overseeing area developments including The Woodlands, Bridgeland in Cypress and The Woodlands Hills community in Conroe and Willis. Western Midstream Partners leases nearly 134,000 square feet on the top five floors.
The company, which develops commercial, residential and mixed-use real estate throughout the U.S., also owns the neighboring 30-story 1201 Lake Robbins office tower. That 808,000-squarefoot building, built for Anadarko in 2002, is fully leased by Occidental Petroleum through 2032.
Hughes purchased both buildings, along with an adjacent land tract, from Occidental for $565 million in late 2019, a few months after Oxy completed its acquisition of Anadarko.
The 9950 Woodloch Forest Tower has more space available than most in the Hughes portfolio in The Woodlands, where the company owns more than a dozen buildings totaling nearly 3.2 million square feet.
“The Howard Hughes Corp. currently has approximately an 90 percent Class A occupancy — excluding The Towers at The Waterway, for which we are still implementing final designs at the 9950 Woodloch Forest Tower, with innovations targeting health and wellness remaining top of mind for our development,” Carman said.
The effort to appeal to tenants comes as Houston’s office market continues to struggle with a drop in demand stemming from both COVID-19 and low energy prices.
Already hovering near 22 percent before the pandemic, the region’s office vacancy rate at the end of 2020 was 23.3 percent, according to commercial real estate firm NAI Partners. The market posted its fourth straight quarter of occupancy losses with tenants vacating 671,000 square feet during the fourth quarter.
With the majority of employees at The Woodlands Towers at the Waterway still working remotely, the property has been quiet other than the buzz of construction workers. The work includes building out the Hughes headquarters and carving out speculative suites with the hopes of adding small companies to the tenant roster.
The speculative offices suites are designed to provide move-in ready spaces with flexible lease terms that enable companies to scale up or down over time, Carman said.