1 Houston Center to Be Renamed LyondellBasell Tower Following 358 KSF Lease Extension

January 27, 2012
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

A commitment can go a long way and in the case of LydondellBasell Tower, it’s going all the way to the top — the top of the 1 million-square-foot 1 Houston Tower office building in Houston. The plastics and chemical manufacturer has entered into an agreement to extend its 358,100-square-foot lease with Crescent Real Estate Holdings L.L.C., an agreement that will result in 1 Houston Tower being renamed LydondellBasell Tower.

LydondellBasell has called 1 Houston home for approximately 25 years. Carrying the address of 1221 McKinney St, the 46-story high-rise occupies a full city block in the city’s central business district. The building, which first opened its doors in 1978, is one of four office structures encompassing an aggregate 4.2 million square feet of Class A office space at the mixed-use Houston Center complex.

While LydondellBasell may or may not have been able to have its own namesake tower if it had chosen to leave its longtime home at Houston Center, the company did have options for office digs elsewhere in the city. The office vacancy rate in metropolitan Houston in the fourth quarter was 16 percent, according to a report by commercial real estate services firm Grubb & Ellis Co., and there were a few large blocks of space available for occupancy. Options included 370,000 square feet vacated by the Hess Corp. at One Allen Center and a 360,000-square-foot space at BG Group Place.

Financial details of LydondellBasell’s lease with Crescent have not been disclosed, but outside of what was certainly an agreement with favorable terms, the company had other reasons for staying put. “Houston Center is one of the foremost addresses in the Central Business District and we have a long history in this complex,” Kevin Brown, executive vice president with LydondellBasell, noted in a prepared statement.