Exclusive: Luxury Apartment Developer Buys Land in Growing Houston Area
A roughly 15-acre contiguous tract of land near Lake Houston and Atascocita has been sold to a developer.
California-based Lee & Associates’ Houston office brokered the sale on behalf of the buyer, Darrow, which plans to build a Class A luxury apartment complex on the land. Wheless Properties represented the sellers – a group of roughly 20 individual land owners, said Lee & Associates’ Reed Vestal, who represented Darrow alongside Taylor Schmidt.
All in all, from first discussions to the complicated assemblage of the land, the deal took around a year to close, Vestal said. Portions of the land formerly belonged to Humble Oil & Gas, he said, which later merged with Exxon Co. in the early ’70s.
The 14.88-acre tract of land is part of a bigger, 30-acre plot, Vestal said.
“If you look at the tract, it appears that there’s a lot of land left, but a lot of it has been spoken for,” Vestal said. “There’s remaining land near us, but it won’t necessarily be utilized for high-density purposes. It’ll only be utilized for retail, single family – things that we wouldn’t necessarily compete against.”
The northeast Houston area has been on the verge of a quiet boom for quite some time. The nearby Kingwood Medical Center is undergoing a $35 million expansion that’ll give the hospital heightened capacity. Kroger Marketplace just opened a 123,000-square-foot northeast Houston store as part of a bigger development near Interstate 69 and the Grand Parkway. And the Humble Independent School District recently secured 15.3 acres in northeast Houston for a new elementary school.
“It’s a newer suburb that’s taken root and is probably one of the healthiest submarkets in Houston,” Vestal said.
Additionally, Vestal said he’s working on several build-to-suit developments, mostly within the industrial sector. He’s also working on land transactions for buyers interested in developing storage centers, retail and industrial developments, too.
“Since the election, this is the hottest the Houston market has been in probably three years,” Vestal said. “This is the busiest we’ve been.”
To view the article on Houston Business Journal, click here.