Talks Produce 91,795-SF Consolidation Pact

The deal between tenant and building broker, Darryl Cothron, associate with PM Realty Group's Dallas team, has been under negotiation since March. The international building products firm, based in Britain, plans to roll most back-office functions from divisional and regional offices in the US into 8505 Freeport Parkway.

Cothron says mid-March is the target date for occupancy. Finish-out contracts will go out after the holiday for the shell space, which was sitting empty in June 2002 when PM Realty got the leasing assignment, he tells GlobeSt.com.

The stair-stepped lease gives Hanson four full floors in a six-story structure and gives the class B building owner a 98%-occupied, 122,000-sf property. Quoted rates are about $16 per sf plus electric in the 20-year-old office building owned by Freeport Royal Partners LP of Irving. The regional office lease was finalized about a month ago, but details were locked down while Hanson tweaked the final plan.

Cothron says the available building space piqued interest from several full-floor users in the last 18 months, but "obviously we wanted to take care of our existing tenant first." Hanson Aggregates "did its homework" in the market and then went knocking on the broker's door to negotiate a deal that would put Irving in the driver's seat for the nationwide consolidation, according to Cothron.

"Irving is a big winner and the local real estate community is a big winner because Hanson is a quality company with quality people," Cothron says. The deal breaks down into 49,000 sf of renewed space and 42,795 sf of new area in a building off Texas 114 and adjacent to the Marriott Hotel and Convention Center.

The building's proximity to the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and the region's central positioning in the US won the nod for the regional office over competitors on the East and West coasts. "Our new organization will facilitate a more unified approach to our business, leverage best practices and improve our cost structure," Jim Kitzmiller, Hanson's president, said in a press release.