Texas ends year on a high note

Office stats show the market is stable and growing.

DFW Houston Austin San Antonio

Needle movers

Here are a few events and announcements that affected the Texas markets last quarter or will in 2019.

Dallas

The completion of The Union in the fourth quarter was the third new office building added to downtown Dallas in 2018 — bringing a total of almost 1.2 million square feet of high-quality, multi-tenant space to downtown. These new properties have among the highest rents in the area, demonstrating ongoing demand for topquality office in the urban core.

Houston

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced plans for its new campus at CityPlace at Springwoods Village. The HPE development will consist of two buildings and include approximately 568,000 square feet of rentable space. With the addition of HPE, CityPlace will be home to four major corporations.

Fort Worth

At the end of 2018, XTO completed the sale of its sixth downtown building, related to the company’s headquarters move to Houston. The final building sold is one of the largest historically registered buildings in downtown Fort Worth, and its redevelopment has the potential to transform the city. Of the six divested XTO properties, two of them are set to be redeveloped into hotels, and the remaining are now open to new office use.

Austin

A global tech giant announced plans to build a new campus in Austin, and is expected to complete its first building in 36 months. This will create 5,000 new jobs in the first phase and another 4,000 once complete, making them the largest private employer in Austin with 15,000 employees. With scarce space for single-family housing in the area, the campus is likely to spur several multi-family developments in Williamson County.

45 minutes south of Berlin, there’s a hulking airship hangar once known as the Aerium. Today, the place is known as Tropical Islands Resort, a family fun place.

The Aerium was built in the 1990s, when a German company called CargoLifter built it to house a cargo airship it was developing. They went bankrupt (apparently because helium airships were not the future of heavy machine transport). In 2003, a Malaysian company called Tanjong bought the massive place, which measured 1,181 feet long by 688 feet wide by 351 high.