Howard Hughes Corp. Taps JLL to Lease Houston-Area Portfolio 

Scott Fikes, Senior Vice President, JLL Houston. Image courtesy of JLL

The Howard Hughes Corp. has awarded to JLL the leasing assignment for its office portfolio in The Woodlands, Texas. The assignment covers more than 4.2 million square feet of office space, including Class AAA office buildings, along with a further 2.5 million square feet of planned development.

In a prepared statement, Dan Bellow, president of JLL Houston, described the deal as “the culmination of a year-long pursuit that involved JLL colleagues from numerous business lines across different markets….”

The JLL team on the assignment will be headed by Scott Fikes, senior vice president of JLL Houston, and Jack Russo, vice president of agency leasing services at JLL Houston.

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To serve the needs of clients in the area, JLL Houston is opening a leasing office in The Woodlands.

In addition to The Woodlands, Fikes and Russo are responsible for office leasing at Bridgeland, another Howard Hughes master-planned community in northwest Houston. As part of this role, they oversee the leasing of a planned 55,000-square-foot mass timber office building, along with future office leasing in Bridgeland Central. An H-E-B grocery store totaling more than 100,000 square feet will also be part of the project’s initial phase.

Soft, for some

The Houston office market remains soft, despite a couple of sizable recent leasing deals in the Katy Freeway West submarket, according to a first-quarter report from JLL. MODEC signed for 116,000 square feet at West Memorial Place I, in a relocation from Energy Crossing II. Kiewit expanded its 171,300-square-foot space at Energy Center I by 106,000 square feet.

Otherwise, however, the region’s office market is lackluster, with four straight quarters of negative net absorption and an overall average vacancy of 25.6 percent.

What brightens the picture—for some owners—is the bifurcation seen in so many metro areas, between newer, more desirable product with modern amenities versus older properties. JLL reports that Class A buildings completed after 2014 saw a net occupancy growth of 171,417 square feet and a 13.4 percent vacancy in the first quarter.