Starwood JV Buys Suburban Austin Office Asset

August 28, 2019

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The partnership acquired the five-building, 319,000-square-foot Campus at Arboretum, situated 15 miles from downtown Austin.

Campus at Arboretum, Building I. Image via Google Street View

Starwood Capital Group has again teamed up with Vanderbilt Partners in their latest purchase, Campus at Arboretum in Austin, Texas.

Campus at Arboretum is a 319,000-square-foot office campus at 10415 Morado Circle in Northwest Austin, 15 miles from downtown Austin. The campus includes five three-story buildings and two four-level parking buildings. The ground-floor lobbies of the buildings underwent renovations in 2016 and the campus now offers such amenities as common seating areas, fitness center, conference room, food trucks and urban gardening areas for the tenants.

Starwood and Vanderbilt have worked together on multiple occasions this year, including purchasing a Jacksonville office portfolio in May and a Raleigh, N.C., office campus in July.

Casey Wold, senior managing director at Vanderbilt Partners, attributed their recent purchase to the combination of Austin being “one of the best office markets in the United States” and Campus at Arboretum offering a unique office campus setting that would likely retain tenants and generate good returns. The buildings already host a variety of tenants including law firm Akerman, financial firm Ameriprise and IT consultant Presidio, according to Yardi Matrix data.

Austin’s tech growth

Austin is fast becoming a tech center for the state with companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook all vying for more space and labor. According to a recent Yardi Matrix report, Austin’s office market saw an addition of 10,400 jobs year-over-year through March. The report added that Amazon is planning to add 800 tech jobs at the Domain, a popular shopping center that is just a couple miles away from Campus at Arboretum.

The Texan city’s numbers are also outpacing the national average, per Yardi Matrix. In the report, Austin totaled 287,000 office jobs at the end of March, or more than 25 percent of the metro area’s total workforce, beating out the national average of more than 21 percent.