Liberty Property Trust broke ground this week on its first office development in Houston. LPT city manager Jay Kraft (snapped on site yesterday with senior project manager Ken Chang) tells us Legacy at Fallbrook will include three office buildings just west of Fairbanks North Houston with Beltway access and visibility. Phase 1 is a LEED Silver facility totaling five stories and 208k SF. It’ll deliver in Q1 ’15. Jay says the biggest thing setting it apart will be a large outdoor seating component with plush landscaping, a water feature (you can take a quick swim during your lunch break), and WiFi. Powers Brown handled design and EE Reed is the GC.

Jay says LPT is a major office developer in other metros, so it wasn’t a big stretch to go office on this site. Stream's Stewart Lyman tells us Legacy at Fallbrook (rendered here) is benefiting from the submarket’s tight vacancy (5.6%) and limited openings; Stream is handling leasing. There are only two blocks over 40k SF available on the Northwest Belt, and they’re both subleases. Because of this (and over 2M SF of potential deals focused on West and Northwest Houston now), demand has been very healthy.

LPT will launch construction of its final two buildings as the previous one hits 75% leased. Jay tells us the firm’s future in Houston office development will depend on the success of this project, but it definitely will continue to focus heavily on industrial either way. (Industrial is a magnet and LPT is steel... or vice versa.) It just completed Greens Crossing 4 and 5 (230k SF). Fallbrook Distribution Center (400k SF—above, Ken and Jay were there last Friday with LPT’s Hans Brindley and Cadence McShane’s Tommy Carden and Dan Delforge) is under construction and delivering in May, and later this year it’ll kick off its Rankin Road industrial development.