Big Developers Love Timber Buildings

Announcements from two of the biggest developers in the business offer encouraging news for the timber building business.

It was good news for the mass timber building sector at the recent National Association of Real Estate Editors in Austin as two of the biggest commercial developers said that wooden buildings are leasing up faster and getting higher rents as compared with structures using standard building materials. 

Representatives from Hines and Howard Hughes Holding, which are key developers in the commercial building sector, also said costs are coming down for mass timber structures and that the levels of carbon in these building is substantially less than those that use more conventional materials like steel and concrete.

“The velocity of the leasing is the market speaking to us,” Hines senior managing director John Mooz said. The company’s new 100,000-square-foot T3 ATX Eastside office and residential building finished in Austin in November is 47 percent leased, he said. He added that given that the Austin market is very soft right now for office occupancy this was good news. “It’s experiential,” Mooz said. “People respond well to biophilic design,” adding that he expects Hines to pursue more mass timber projects.

Howard Hughes said it is building a 490,000-square-foot mass timber office building One Bridgeland Green in Cypress, TX, not a prime office market. Yet Hughes said the building is 80 percent leased ahead of completion. The company said it too plans to look at developing more mass timber projects.

Building rendering: One Bridgeland Green, Howard Hughes

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