HOUSTON – (Realty News Report) – Occidental Petroleum has leased 91,986 square feet at Three Greenway Plaza, solidifying its headquarters in the Greenway Plaza development after considerable speculation over the last two years.
The Three Greenway transaction increases the size of OXY’s US headquarters at Greenway Plaza to more than 972,000 square feet of office space. Greenway Plaza is a 52-acre campus strategically located between downtown and Uptown in Houston’s Inner Loop. Originally developed by Century Development in the 1970s and 1980s, Greenway Plaza is operated by Parkway Property Investments
“We’re thrilled to retain OXY as a large, longtime tenant at Greenway Plaza,” said Eric Siegrist, Parkway’s Managing Director of Leasing. “The 11-building campus is attractive to companies that value a collaborative and dynamic business community that evolves with their needs and enables companies to recruit and enhance employee satisfaction.”
OXY was represented by Brandon Clarke, Charles Gordon, Steve Hesse and Ryan Roth of CBRE, Inc. Rima Soroka, Director of Leasing, led efforts on behalf of Parkway.
A couple of years ago, OXY put its Greenway Plaza space, about 814,000 SF at that time, up for sublease. Then, OXY bought the 63-acre former ConocoPhillips campus in the Energy Corridor.
With rapidly evolving strategies, Occidental bought Anadarko Petroleum Corp. for $55 billion, creating a surplus of office space for OXY. Anadarko, another Houston based firm, owned two large office towers in The Woodlands.
The last moving piece on the OXY chess board, involved Anadarko’s office towers in The Woodlands. Late in 2019, Howard Hughes Corp., the developer of The Woodlands, acquired the Anadarko Tower in The Woodlands and the former Conoco campus in a $565 million deal.
OXY retained a 31-story, 807,586-SF office building that had been known as the Anadarko Allison Tower at 1201 Lake Robbins Drive. Occidental has leased the entire building for another 13 years.
But the other Anadarko building, 30-story, 595,854-SF office tower at 9950 Woodloch Forest Drive that had been called the Anadarko Hackett Tower, is going to be vacated by OXY. The Howard Hughes Corp., which has been based in Dallas, will relocate its headquarters into the building.
All this set the stage for OXY to settle down in Greenway Plaza, which is near the Southwest Freeway and Buffalo Speedway, just north of the affluent West University Place community. Greenway Plaza was assembled by Kenneth Schnitzer, who acquired hundreds of post-war single-family homes in one of the most famous assemblages ever accomplished in Texas.
Greenway Plaza reports 265,000 square feet of new and expansion lease transactions last year in diverse fields ranging from oil and gas, financial services and real estate to legal and technology/innovation.
“Parkway continues to invest energy and capital in Greenway Plaza with the goal of enhancing the lifestyle of its occupants and furthering productivity levels for tenants,” said Allen de Olazarra, President and Chief Operating Officer of Parkway.
Greenway Plaza tenants and their guests enjoy onsite offerings including a new 150,000-square-foot, “Diamond Club” Lifetime facility, a conferencing facility, a child care center, activated common spaces with curated programming, Zagster bike sharing program, a regular rotation of food trucks, as well as an array of acclaimed food and beverage concepts including Fusion Eats, Feges BBQ, burger-chan, The Rice Box, Tony’s and Next Seed Space incubator.
Parkway currently operates and/or provides accounting services for approximately 21.7 million square feet of high-quality office properties located in attractive submarkets in California, Texas, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.
