HOUSTON – The sale of BBVA Compass Plaza established Houston’s new per-square-foot record high price for an office building sale – over $527 per square foot for the Uptown office building.
This topped the previous per square foot record of $524 PSF with the $442.5 million sale of the Hess Tower in downtown Houston.
The 22-story, 326,200-square-foot BBVA building, at 2200 Post Oak Blvd, just a couple of blocks north of the Galleria, was recently purchased by Spain-based Masaveu Post Oak Houston Delaware for $172 million.
The BBVA building is a mixed-use project with Caracol, a Mexican seafood restaurant by world-class chef Hugo Ortega, on the ground floor.
The building’s seller – a partnership of Stream Realty, TRC Capital Partners (formerly Redstone Cos.) and an institutional client of L&B Realty Advisors – was represented by HFF’s Scott Galloway, Dan Miller, Matt Kafka, Colby Mueck and Trent Agnew.
The BBVA building, which opened in 2013, is 83 percent leased, with BBVA bank occupying 185,000 SF of the tower. The bank’s parent company is based in Spain.
The BBVA also tops the sale of Houston’s 1000 Main building, which was purchased in March by Union Investment, a German investment fund for more than $435 million.
The 844,763-square-foot Hess Tower, 1501 McKinney, was purchased in December 2011 by H&R REIT, a Canadian firm. The seller was the building’s developers Trammell Crow and Principal.
The BBVA Compass building broke a construction drought in the Uptown/Galleria area. It was the fist new office project there in decades.
“With its groundbreaking, BBVA Compass Plaza ignited a development renaissance in Houston’s most coveted submarket that is on-going and encompasses more than 6,050 luxury multi-housing units, more than two million square feet of office space, in excess of 697,000 square feet of high-street retail and two new luxury hotels,” added Miller. “The transformative impact that this property has had on the Galleria skyline cannot be overstated, placing it at the forefront of the ‘urbanization’ movement in the Houston marketplace.”
The sale, with its Spanish buyer, demonstrates a deep trend – foreign investors are hot for the Uptown area and have purchased a number of properties there in recent years.
“The sale of BBVA Compass Plaza reflects the continued interest of foreign capital in Class A product in superb locations in Houston such as the Uptown/Galleria submarket,” said Steve Lerner, CEO of TRC Capital Partners, which was formerly known as Redstone.
Preston Young, regional managing partner at Stream added, “This transaction is yet another shining example of the desirability amongst our industry’s most prominent investors to have a presence in Houston.”
By Ralph Bivins, Editor, Realty News Report
Dec. 15, 2015