Houston-based developer Broadview Real Estate announced plans to build a 32-story, 520K SF office tower on Westheimer near the River Oaks District.
But a groundbreaking date and equity partner for the project have yet to be determined, Anish Bavishi, managing director of Broadview Capital, told Bisnow.
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O27, named for the ZIP code 77027, is slated for a nearly 2-acre site at 4701 Westheimer Road.
The address is occupied by an extended-stay hotel, which Broadview plans to demolish, Bavishi said. It is just across Loop 610 from The Galleria and across Westheimer from The Greenleigh, the soon-to-open luxury remodel of Hotel Derek.
O27 will target the ultra-luxury sector of office tenants, with the goal of offering something Houston has never seen before. It should align with high-end condos like The Ritz-Carlton Hotel & Residences Houston and the St. Regis Residences being delivered, Bavishi said.
This project has been in the works in some form since 2021. There have been numerous conversations with potential equity partners like pension funds and family offices throughout that time, though nothing has been finalized, he said.
“We’ve had a lot of discussions,” Bavishi added. “Because we felt like we wanted to bring the project to Houston as quickly as possible, we wanted to launch and then figure all that other stuff out in parallel.”
While equity seems to be virtually absent this year, funding is available and sitting on the sidelines, Bavishi said. It’s being very selective and looking for standout assets with a long horizon ahead.
Broadview feels that O27 will fit that bill. While Houston has some wonderful offices, this project will be architecturally significant and stand apart from anything previously delivered, according to Bavishi.
“We're really going for something different, really ultra-luxury, and a high-end hospitality feel,” he said.
STG Design drew up plans for a building with an unconventional, sinuous shape, a penthouse crown, and a landscaped terrace atop a nine-story parking deck.
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Design Alt + Tab designed the entrance drive and lobby. The motor court plans include a water wall feature and an overhead canopy embedded with fiber optics to evoke a night sky.
O27's launch announcement comes amid a scant but growing office development pipeline for Houston, with four projects in the city’s Inner Loop.
A building with 116K SF of fully preleased office space is under construction at Autry Park, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s third-quarter office report. A 200K SF research, laboratory and office building, The Arc at The Ion, is also slated for groundbreaking this quarter, it states.
Southern Land Co. in April broke ground on a 953K SF mixed-use building with 107K SF of office in Upper Kirby.
Just this month, Stonelake Capital Partners announced it had broken ground on 100 Park Place, a 17-story, 266K SF office tower at 4100 Westheimer Road. That is about a half-mile down the road from the O27 site, on the other side of the River Oaks District shopping center.
Broadview is not concerned about competition from other projects due to the thinness of the overall pipeline in recent years, and especially considering other projects’ limited size, Bavishi said.
At 520K SF, O27 could accommodate major corporations that occupy 200K SF to 300K SF, he said. The last office building over 500K SF built in Houston was the 1M SF Texas Tower, completed by Hines in 2021.
“We really identified office as a gap that needed to be filled in Houston,” Bavishi said. “We didn't see anybody else doing so in such a meaningful way.”
Broadview Real Estate is a division of Broadview Capital, founded by brothers Anish and Ashay Bavishi. O27 is slated for completion in 2028.
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