1 hour ago, H-Town Man said:

 

You didn't have time to ask them?? Couldn't take a photo??! Back in a few days????!

 

Come on man, you are carrying this thread on your shoulders. Don't sit down on the bench in the fourth quarter.

 

 

Very fair criticism!  I walked back, but unfortunately all the workers were gone.  However, this was left behind.

Walked by over lunch and there were 10 - 15 workers on-site working on something... While I didn't have time to ask any of them what was happening there was new heavy equipment present that appeared to be for tearing up concrete. 

Will report back in a few days, but for now... [insert dancing emoji]

Certainly a bummer, but I'm not that concerned on this one.  They've had these plans for some time and sounded like they had the project pretty much capitalized and ready to break ground right before the lockdown.  I guess we'll see, but I believe they'll start construction this year like they hope to.  Crazy how many mid-rise and high-rises will be U/C in Museum District/Hermann Park.  Especially if X Houston gets going.

Costar Article:

Pandemic Postpones 32-Story Apartment Tower in Houston's Museum District

Luxury Skyscraper Was Supposed to Break Ground in the First Quarter

Two Hermann Place could be delayed by at least six to nine months because of the coronavirus pandemic, but developers are still hopeful the project will start this year. (Tema Development, Nitya Capital)

Wow @Paco Jones coming in guns blazing!

I walk by this garage almost every day and it looks like they are about wrapped up.  Fingers crossed we see this existing equipment moved off site in the next day or two and immediately replaced with new equipment.

Another great article from Costar on TMC.  A big takeaway was the below statement from McKeon:

'McKeon said the TMC3 project is sparking interest and investment from private companies.  He already has a letter-of-intent with a major industry player for a 500,000-square-foot-building in the complex.'

"We'll be announcing deal after deal after deal with the industry.  It's amazing the speed and the appetite they've had," McKeon said.  "The sleeping giant has awoken and now we're open for business."

Wondering who this could be... Medtronic or Johnson & Johnson perhaps?

Houston Aims to Become a US 'Medical Device Mecca'

The first successful artificial heart transplant. The first battery-powered heart pump. The first silicone gel breast implant.

These medical device breakthroughs took place in Houston. Now scientists and civic leaders are hoping the city could be home to more medical device innovations, thanks to a confluence of a university's major expansion near the world's largest medical district, the Texas Medical Center, the city's relative affordability compared to high-tech areas such as Silicon Valley, and collaborations with top research institutions.

Texas A&M University System and its partners plan to pour a half-billion dollars into a project near the TMC they say could help turn Houston into a growing hub for medical device innovation. The university system and Houston-based developer Medistar Corp. are behind the $546 million mixed-use complex that features three skyscrapers, including a renovated 18-story tower to house the university's medical engineering program where "physicianeers" in training are required to invent a medical device to graduate.

It's not going to be easy: In a national ranking of regions for the medical device industry, Texas only ranked No. 7, and powerhouse states like California aren't sitting by idly. In Texas, officials are counting on Texas A&M's expanded medical engineering presence to add to public, private and educational research efforts already underway in Houston that could elevate a nascent medical device industry in the state, proponents say.

The work is happening against the backdrop of the proposed 37-acre biotech campus, called TMC3, which is perhaps optimistically dubbed the "Third Coast" for life sciences and is expected to break ground in the second quarter. It may be a reach, and could be partly based on some big Texas bluster, but the effort shows how medical innovation is a driver of real estate development across the United States.

"The ultimate goal is to have both the East and West coasts shaking in their boots — or whatever shoes they’re wearing," Dr. Paul Cherukuri, executive director of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering at Houston’s Rice University, said in an interview with CoStar News.

While the national competition is tough, and gaining funding is always competitive, Houston shows it can take on other cities. Houston is already home to more than 1,760 life sciences companies, and local institutions received $668 million in medical research grant funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2018, a 6.9% increase from the year before.

Bill McKeon, CEO of the Texas Medical Center Corp., the nonprofit that oversees the 50 million-square-foot TMC campus where more than 100,000 employees work, said Texas and Houston are at a critical turning point. McKeon, who spent much of his career in the medical device industry at firms like Medtronic, argues that there is not a single city for known for medical device innovation, research and development, besides clusters in Boston and Minneapolis.

He said CEOs at major medical device companies have started telling him they see Houston as the next go-to place for medical device innovation. McKeon said there are several medical device deals in the works for the proposed TMC3 campus that he expects to announce later this year. Plans for the campus call for 1.5 million square feet of buildings and parks designed to look like a double helix DNA strand from above.

"I think the Medical Center … will be where the medical device mecca will happen in the United States," McKeon said in an interview.

Expansion Challenge

Restrictive covenants inside the TMC historically prevented private, for-profit companies from significantly expanding. Instead, nonprofit hospitals, healthcare systems and research institutions have dominated the district. The new TMC3 campus loosens restrictions for for-profit endeavors, opening new opportunities for for-profit companies to work alongside nonprofits, universities and research institutions.

McKeon said the TMC3 project is sparking interest and investment from private companies. He already has a letter-of-intent with a major industry player for a 500,000-square-foot-building in the complex.

"We’ll be announcing deal after deal after deal with the industry. It’s amazing the speed and the appetite they’ve had," McKeon said. "The sleeping giant has awoken and now we’re open for business."

McKeon and others have noted that the TMC is attractive for product researchers because they can access a large, diverse pool of patients to develop and test new products. About 10 million patients visit the TMC every year, according to the TMC, and Houston is now considered one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country. TMC3 is meant to put the industry, researchers and startups together to speed the time from idea to manufacturing new products.

"When you’re working with patients, you want that feedback immediately to close the time from innovation to commercialization — and that really requires the industry side-by-side with researchers," McKeon said.

Medical device deals inside TMC3 and the new Texas A&M University complex are expected to add to work already underway nearby at Rice University, a private research university with a medical innovation master’s program. A Rice University team of neuroengineers is developing a headset technology that can directly link the human brain to machines without surgery, backed by $18 million in U.S. Department of Defense funding.

Texas is an attractive option for medical technology startups because of its affordability when compared to east and west coast cities. Among the nation’s 20 most populous metropolitan areas, Houston’s housing costs are 49.3% below the average, and its overall costs are 25.4% below average, according to the Council for Community and Economic Research.

"The cost of doing research and startups out there and in Silicon Valley [is getting more expensive]. People are coming to Houston. I think you’re going to start seeing a lot more [medical innovation] hits coming out of Houston," Cherukuri said.

Financial Collaborations

While cities such as Boston benefit from collaborations with deep pocketed research institutions such as Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Silicon Valley works with Stanford University, Houston has deep pockets of its own. TMC3 is a collaboration between Texas A&M University Health Science Center, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The UT System and Texas A&M System rank in the top 10 in the nation for largest endowments of U.S. colleges and universities, and Rice University ranks in the top 20, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Texas has a big challenge in trying to catch up to other states. It lags behind states including California, Minnesota and Massachusetts for the medical device industry. There were 72, 471 professionals working for the medical device industry in California last year, where roughly $2.5 billion of venture capital funding flowed into medical device companies, according to industry magazine Medical Design & Outsourcing. That compares to Texas, where there were just 15,087 professionals employed by the medical device industry and just $53 million in venture capital funneled to industry startups.

The Texas Medical Center, the eighth-largest business district in the United States, has already started to see more interest from the medical device industry.

Fortune 500 medical tech company Johnson & Johnson opened its Center for Device Innovation in 2017 inside the TMC, the multinational firm’s only research and development center dedicated to inventing medical devices to make surgeries less invasive and bring procedures to underserved populations.

Johnson & Johnson also runs an incubator program in the medical center called JLabs @ TMC, alongside an accelerator program for healthcare entrepreneurs called TMCx. The TMC Innovation Institute is also home to AT&T Foundry, which is researching network connectivity for prosthetic limbs. And last year, robotics company ABB opened a 5,300-square-foot facility within TMC dedicated to finding new ways to use robots in the healthcare industry.

Integar, the largest medical device contractor manufacturer in the world, is headquartered in Plano outside of Dallas, and the state is home to several manufacturing facilities for Fortune 500 medical tech companies and subsidiaries such as Stryker, Cardinal Health and Becton Dickinson. One of the largest industrial construction projects underway in Houston is a 1.3 million-square-foot warehouse for Medline Industries, the largest private medical supply manufacturer in the world.

Funding Challenge

Becoming a national leader won't be easy. In speaking with executives at medical technology startups, Cherukuri, the Rice University professor, said raising venture capital funding in Houston continues to be a challenge, though that is changing slowly.

After all, Houston isn’t known as a startup magnet like Austin, which in spite of being a significantly smaller city, raked in $2.2 billion in venture capital funding in 2019 across 263 deals, according to PitchBook data.

Last year, venture capital funneled $543.9 million into Houston startups, the highest number on record for the Houston region, according to an analysis from Pitchbook by the Greater Houston Partnership.

Healthcare and life sciences startups were the biggest target for funding, scoring about $244 million across 26 deals, according to the partnership. Half of that total came from Houston’s largest venture capital deal of the year, a $121 million series B funding to the immunology firm Allovir.

Economic development and civic leaders in Houston are trying to spur startup growth in the so-called Innovation District, a proposed 4-mile district stretching from the Texas Medical Center north to downtown and is anchored by The Ion, an innovation hub redevelopment of a former Sears by Rice University in the Midtown neighborhood. Though the proposed Innovation District isn’t without its critics, proponents argue it could be a critical step in building a true startup ecosystem in the city.

Justin Boyar, CoStar's director of market analytics in Houston, said the new Texas A&M program and The Ion could help generate the tech startup and venture capital interest in Houston needed to propel the medical device industry into a more national spotlight.

"Midtown’s growing profile as a soon-to-be burgeoning tech cluster adds to the attractiveness of Houston’s growing medtech R&D cluster profile, as it provides density and room for a medtech presence to eventually grow," Boyar said. "Houston still has a ways to go to gain ground on the top medtech R&D hubs, such as the Bay Area, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Warsaw, Indiana … but I do think Houston is moving in the right direction."

Great HBJ article this morning.  The bolded text at the end is very encouraging.

Houston hospital systems, Texas universities and private developers are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to grow their presences in the Texas Medical Center — the planet’s largest medical center.

Most recently, the Texas A&M University System announced on Feb. 20 that it would build a $550 million complex in the heart of the TMC. The development will include a new 19-floor student housing tower; a new 30-floor medical office tower; and a renovated 18-story building to house the university’s innovative EnMed degree program.

The massive development project is being funded through a public-private partnership. State funds totaling $145 million facilitated Texas A&M’s land purchase near the TMC and the renovation of the existing 18-floor building. Private industry will cover the remaining $401 million to construct the two new towers.

Having a large presence in the Texas Medical Center will aid Texas A&M’s medical research and recruiting capabilities, said Greg Hartman, interim senior vice president for the Texas A&M University Health Science Center. Just as Texas A&M invests in its sports facilities to recruit the nation’s top athletic talent, the Health Science Center needed to build a premier medical research facility in the TMC, Hartman said.

“The same way you build weight rooms to recruit football and basketball players, and new gymnasiums and swimming pools to attract elite athletes, you’ve got to have those same kind of facilities to attract elite medical students and researchers,” Hartman said.

Finding the industry loophole

In 2017, the Texas A&M University System purchased an 18-story building on 5.5 acres at 1020 Holcombe Blvd. For-profit entities are barred from operating on the 1,400 acres owned by the nonprofit TMC — but Texas A&M owns its own land. That way, the university can attract and partner with for-profit corporations and public entities.

“Because we are just outside of the medical center, we don’t have covenants or any restrictions dealing with private folks,” said John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System. “So, a for-profit Pfizer could come in right next to somebody from Baylor College of Medicine that has rented some research space.”

Houston-based Medistar Corp. is the developer for the Texas A&M project. Medistar also developed the InterContinental Houston-Medical Center, the first luxury hotel built in the TMC area in decades. The company is also nearing groundbreaking for the new Innovation Tower — a 48-story, mixed-use facility to be situated at 6700 Main St., next to the InterContinental. Paul McCleary, senior vice president of business development for Medistar Corp., said Innovation Tower will become the tallest building in the TMC when it’s completed.

Innovation Tower will consist of ground level retail space; dry lab and research space for medical, biomedical and health tech companies; 410 luxury apartment units; and parking for up to 2,000 vehicles, McCleary said. Similar to Texas A&M’s project, Innovation Tower has for-profit entities in mind. Currently, if a health care giant, like a Pfizer or a Medtronic, were looking for a large office footprint in the heart of the TMC, they wouldn’t find it, McCleary said. Innovation Tower aims to fill that need.

“If you’re a larger group that has a requirement for maybe [30,000], [50,000] or 100,000 square feet, the next question is, ‘Where is that available in the Texas Medical Center?’” McCleary said. “Today I would tell you it doesn’t exist.”

Healthy growth

Medistar recently broke ground on The Fountains, a 326-unit multifamily development at the corner of Alice and Ardmore east of the TMC, McCleary said. Aside from larger office space and student housing, McCleary emphasized the need for additional multifamily apartment units around the TMC as the area continues to grow.

Outside of Texas A&M’s massive project and Innovation Tower, there are other major developments in store for the TMC. Bill McKeon, president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center, said groundbreaking for the new 37-acre TMC3 campus should happen in the second quarter of 2020. Five partners comprise the TMC3 founding institutions — TMC, Baylor College of Medicine, Texas A&M University Health Science Center, the University of

Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Like the Texas A&M complex, TMC3 was designed to meet a person’s many needs — and not simply the needs of the working employee. The project is centered around a DNA helix-shaped green space promenade that will span the length of the campus. The facilities surrounding the promenade will include over 100,000 square feet of retail space.

“The needs of our physicians and researchers have changed dramatically,” McKeon said. “They demand to be in work-live-play environments. They want to be in a densified area that has all the amenities necessary for the whole person — not just the person who’s going to work.”

McKeon said there’s never been a more active time of development in the 75-year history of the TMC. From TMC3 to the Texas A&M complex to Innovation Tower — the world’s largest medical city is only getting larger. The TMC thinks that many new entrants will be for-profit corporations.

“Now, we’re actually opening the doors and creating a whole new environment for industry to play right alongside, and the response has been really exciting,” McKeon said.

Sleeping giant

Other institutions in the TMC are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in hospital expansions. Memorial Hermann Health System — the largest health system in Houston — opened the new Sarofim Pavilion in late February. Susan and Fayez Sarofim, the billionaire behind Houston-based investment firm Fayez Sarofim & Co., donated $25 million for the project — the largest gift Memorial Hermann had ever received when it was announced in February 2018. The Sarofim Pavilion was part of a roughly $700 million renovation and expansion project at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, according to Memorial Hermann.

The new 17-floor tower has more than 140 patient rooms; 24 operating rooms, including three hybrid ORs; a 335-seat cafeteria dubbed the Arboretum Café; and 900 new parking spots. Sarofim Pavilion also is the new home of the Red Duke Trauma Institute at Memorial Hermann-TMC — one of two adult Level 1 trauma centers in Houston. Operations for Memorial Hermann’s air ambulance service, Life Flight, moved on top of the new tower.

In August 2019, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center broke ground on a $159 million expansion of its Proton Therapy Center at 1840 Old Spanish Trail. The expansion will grow the center’s footprint to over 160,000 square feet, enough room for the cancer center to house eight proton therapy radiation machines developed by Japanese technology manufacturer Hitachi. The center currently spans 73,500 square feet.

On top of the hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into the TMC right now, even more deals with industry are waiting to be announced once TMC3 breaks ground, McKeon said.

“They’re realizing that the sleeping giant has awoken and now we’re open for business,” McKeon said. “We’re just seeing it with Texas A&M University — and wait until TMC3 opens.”

42 minutes ago, CRE-Sleuth said:

Long time lurker of the forum...first time poster. The main office tenant is Live Nation, they will be taking ~75K SF on floors 4,5 & 6.

I'll go ahead and be proactive... see below from Costar:

Entertainment company Live Nation has signed an office lease for creative space under construction in Houston in one of the city's biggest office deals so far this year.

Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, is planning to take about 75,000 square feet on floors 4, 5 and 6 in one of the buildings at the 800 block of Westheimer in the Montrose Collective mixed-use project, according to sources familiar with the company's search for space.

A representative for Los Angeles-based Live Nation declined to comment "at this time."

Montrose Collective is being developed by Radom Capital, which just broke ground on the project Westheimer by the Uchi restaurant at 904 Westheimer. The area was recently named as one of the nation’s top 20 coolest streets in a report by Cushman & Wakefield because of its walkability, diversity, nightlife, food scene and vintage stores.

Plans include a 150,000-square-foot project, with about 40,000 square feet of high-end shops and restaurants, plus about 110,000 square feet of office space.

The project team behind Montrose Collective previously said a technology tenant leased 75,000 square feet of office space, but declined to identify the tenant. Live Nation describes itself as an entertainment company, but it owns Ticketmaster, a massive online ticketing platform.

Live Nation's current Houston office is located about 4 1/2 miles west of Montrose Collective at 2000 West Loop South in the Uptown-Galleria area, according to Moody Rabin, which leases the building for the owner. Live Nation leases about 48,000 square feet at 2000 West Loop South in a lease that expires in December 2021, according to Moody Rambin.

It is not clear if Live Nation plans to vacate the space or use the Montrose area space as an expansion of its Houston operations.

Live Nation, which posted $8.7 billion in revenue for the first nine months of last year, has been expanding its footprint elsewhere around the country. The company recently signed a 40,000-square-foot lease in a two-level space in a proposed high-rise in Seattle at 1200 Stewart, according to media reports. In December, Live Nation was also in talks to lease 40,000 square feet in a new Nashville project proposed at Fourth Avenue South and Chestnut Street. Live Nation declined to comment on any of its recent real estate leases.

The entertainment company made almost $254.6 million in profit for the first nine months of last year, up about 13% from the same time the previous year, according to its most recent earnings results.

Last fall, the company announced it had booked more than 1,500 stadium concerts and festivals in 2020, posting double-digit growth from the same time in 2018. Its full year 2019 earnings have not yet been released.

Live Nation is under fire from anti-trust enforcers at the Justice Department for allegedly violating an agreement that allowed its merger with Ticketmaster in 2009. The agreement, which was recently extended into 2025, prohibits Live Nation from forcing venues to use Ticketmater instead of its competitors.

The Justice Department has accused Live Nation of strong-arming six venues into using Tickemaster, which the concert giant has denied, according to media reports.

Meanwhile, other large office deals signed in Houston so far this include a renewal and expansion by Enterprise Products Partners in downtown Houston at 1100 Louisiana for 512,845 square feet; about 92,500-square-foot sublease for EDP Renewables North America at 1501 McKinney St., also in downtown; and a 69,000-square-foot sublease in Houston's Uptown-Galleria area at 1500 Post Oak Blvd. for Sempra Energy, according to CoStar data.