Boeing Exercises First-Refusal Rights With $42M Buy

CLEAR LAKE, TX-The Boeing Co., exercising a right of first refusal, has paid $42 million for a 399,000-sf, class A office building to block serious talks between owner, Trizec Properties Inc., and an off-market buyer for a multi-tenant asset in the NASA submarket.

For Boeing, the purchase opens the opportunity to expand in a tight office submarket while the Chicago-based Trizec gets to eliminate a suburban straggler in a Houston portfolio with more than six million sf in seven CBD high rises. “We were regularly getting calls from interested parties,” a Trizec spokesman tells GlobeSt.com about the sale of 3700 Bay Area Blvd. in Clear Lake, adjacent to the Johnson Space Center. “We started listening seriously as we started to move the portfolio strategy … to markets and submarkets where we have a presence with multiple properties. We received a firm offer that we took to Boeing and they acted on their right.”

Boeing occupies about 640,000 sf of leased and owned space in five buildings in a four-mile radius surrounding the space center. The just-bought building and parking garage sit in the middle of 21 acres. The site could accommodate another 250,000-sf office building, says William Richard, Boeing’s facilities manager in Houston. For now, he says the plan is to take over 30,000 sf of empty space in the acquired structure, which has housed the headquarters of Boeing’s NASA Systems since its relocation from California in 2001.