Downtown Leasing: Four Office Leases Signed at 811 Louisiana

HOUSTON – Colvill Office Properties has closed on four new office leases at 811 Louisiana, a 577,735-SF office tower located in Houston’s Central Business District.

The recently completed transactions include a 19,222-SF lease to Willis Towers Watson; a 6,150-SF lease to the McFarland, PLLC law firm; a 4,433-SF lease to EVX Midstream Partners; and a 3,362-SF lease to Booking.com.

Paula Bruns, Damon Thames and Chip Colvill of Colvill Office Properties represented the building’s ownership, Busycon Properties LLC in the leasing transactions.

Jeff Cairns, Bob Denney and Brandon Clarke of CBRE represented Willis Towers Watson; Kevin Kushner and William Padon of CBRE represented McFarland; Alex Taghi of NAI Partners represented EVX; and Weldon Martin of CBRE represented Booking.com.

Hines, which originally developed the building, then called Two Shell Plaza, in the early 1970s, manages the tower today.

“After Shell vacated the building in January 2015, a repositioning of the asset was implemented with a new address, new lobby, new facade, new common area finishes and a tenant conference facility. These improvements represented an additional $21-plus million, so the building is in first-class condition ready for future tenants,” Colvill’s Paula Bruns said in a recent interview. “As a result, we are experiencing significant leasing activity.“

The 811 Louisiana building contains 17 office levels and 12 parking levels. The tower was originally designed by the legendary Bruce Graham of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It sits on a block bounded by Louisiana, Milam, Rusk and Walker.

The building is catty-cornered from One Shell Plaza, a 50-story, 1.6 million SF tower developed by Hines and completed in 1971.

Shell is also vacating One Shell Plaza, which is leased by the Colvill company, a Houston-based landlord representative firm that represents 32 percent of office space in downtown Houston.

The office market in downtown Houston, like other parts of the city, suffered as the energy industry declined over the last two years. The supply of sublease space rose significantly, but in recent months progress has been made in leasing that space. However, Skanska is preparing to move ahead on constructing the 750,000-SF Capitol Tower in downtown.