Exxon Sells 290-Acre Irving HQ to Capital Commercial in Sale Leaseback

Exxon Mobil will be doing a bit of a Texas two-step in 2023, meaning the oil and gas giant will be transitioning between two Texas headquarters locations.

Exxon announced earlier this year that it will relocate its headquarters from Irving in the Dallas Fort-Worth area to its 385-acre campus in a master-planned community known as City Place in a suburb of Houston.

This week, Austin-based Capital Commercial Investments announced it has purchased Exxon’s HQ and the surrounding 290 acres.

The deal is a sale-leaseback that will enable Exxon Mobil to continue to use the Irving-Las Colinas HQ until it is ready to transfer its headquarters to City Place.

The energy giant will consolidate corporate and operational units at City Place, which is now where the bulk of Exxon employees work. The transition is expected to be completed by mid-2023.

Terms of the sale-leaseback deal were not disclosed. Exxon put the property on the market last winter, with JLL marketing the asset.

Capital Commercial has made several major acquisitions in North Texas, including a 1.8M SF former JC Penney campus it is redeveloping in Plano, and a 40-acre, 1.4M SF former American Airlines campus, which the company acquired in 2020 and is now leasing to Bell Textron.

According to a report in the Dallas Business Journal, the North Texas workforce has already been reduced to about 250 employees out of a global workforce of more than 70K.

Consolidating its headquarters into the City Place campus will “enable closer teamwork to accelerate and increase value delivery through company-wide approaches,” Exxon said.

The headquarters move was included in Exxon’s announcement that it will streamline its business structure by combining its chemical and downstream companies, among other changes. Beginning April 1, Exxon will have three primary business lines: ExxonMobil Upstream Co., ExxonMobil Product Solutions and ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions. ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering will support all three.

“ExxonMobil is on track to exceed $6 billion in structural cost savings by 2023, compared to 2019, driven by savings from the new business structure and measures such as centralizing procurement, digital transformation of processes, and right-sizing programs that were announced in 2020,” the company said, in a statement.