HOUSTON – (Realty News Report) – Medistar Corp. and Healthcare Trust of America held a groundbreaking Wednesday for Horizon Tower, a new life sciences and medical building that will strengthen Texas A&M University’s presence adjacent to Houston’s Texas Medical Center.
The 30-story Horizon Tower, scheduled for completion in early 2023, will feature 17 floors of life sciences and medical space above a 13-story, 2,700-space parking structure, along with about 15,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.
“Our rise in prominence—especially within the health care arena—is reflected by the strategic expansion of Texas A&M System properties near the Texas Medical Center,” said Chancellor John Sharp of the Texas A&M University System.
A major excavation for the tower’s foundation is underway at the southeast corner of Holcombe Boulevard and Main Street, with Harvey Commercial General Contracting serving as general contractor.
Horizon Tower is part of the five-acre Texas A&M Innovation Plaza campus. The campus also includes Discovery Tower, an 18-story, 280,000-square-foot academic building anchored by Texas A&M’s Engineering-Medicine (EnMed) program, and Life Tower, a 19-story student housing community with 483 units. These buildings surround an acre of open-air greenspace featuring terraces, water elements and extensive landscaping.
Developer Monzer Hourani, CEO of Medistar, emphasized the importance of the greenspace in the densely built Texas Medical Center. “This is a concrete jungle here in the Texas Medical Center,” Hourani said. The green plaza will offer a welcome retreat for students living in Life Tower.
The residential Life Tower, set to open in summer 2022, will provide housing for Texas A&M medical and engineering students as well as nursing students from Prairie View A&M University.
Hourani, who founded Medistar in 1974, said the Texas A&M development will help position Houston as a major life sciences hub—what he calls the “Third Coast”—where research and innovation move from labs to market-ready solutions.
He noted that established life sciences centers in New England and California will be complemented by Houston’s growing cluster, which includes the new TMC3 campus, Levit Green by Hines, and the core Texas Medical Center complex. The Texas Medical Center employs about 106,000 people, including more than 10,000 with doctoral-level degrees. “It’s going to come here,” Hourani said. “This is the largest medical center in the world.”
Medistar and its partner Healthcare Trust of America have engaged Cushman & Wakefield to lease Horizon Tower, targeting life sciences firms and medical device and technology companies.
Tim Relyea of Cushman & Wakefield
Cushman & Wakefield Executive Vice Chairman Tim Relyea, a Houston office-leasing specialist who has closed more than $47 billion in transactions across roughly 60 million square feet, is leading the leasing team. Team members include William Hartman, Morgan Relyea Colt and James Gale.
Previously, JLL had been announced as the leasing agent for Horizon Tower, but Medistar confirmed that Cushman & Wakefield would lead leasing at the start of 2021.
The building will include emergency power for mission-critical operations and will provide vertical and horizontal pathways for specialized venting and infrastructure. It is the first medical/life sciences building to offer Integrated Viral Protection’s HVAC-integrated and mobile biodefense systems, designed to enhance indoor air quality and continuously protect occupants.
Kirksey Architecture is the project architect, and CIM Group provided construction financing.
$550M – A&M’s Largest Public-Private Partnership Outside College Station
CIM Group recently extended a $135.85 million construction loan to Medistar for the student housing and parking garage components of the development. The groundbreaking for Horizon Tower also served as a topping-out milestone for the Life Tower student housing project.
In total, the 2.2 million-square-foot Innovation Plaza development, delivered by Medistar in partnership with the Texas A&M University System, represents roughly $550 million in investment and is the largest public-private partnership the university has undertaken outside its flagship campus in College Station.
Healthcare Trust of America, Medistar’s development partner, is the largest owner and operator of medical office buildings in the United States, with approximately 25.6 million square feet and about $7.5 billion invested primarily in medical office properties. The REIT is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
Houston’s 360,000 Healthcare and Life Sciences Workers
Houston is a major center for medical and life sciences activity, home to more than 1,760 life sciences companies and roughly 360,000 healthcare and life sciences employees, including over 18,000 biotech specialists and 25,000 top medical researchers and scientists. In 2019, the region hosted more than 5,000 active clinical trials—about 14% of all U.S. trials—and attracted nearly $180 million in life-sciences venture capital. Institutions such as Baylor College of Medicine, a leader in genomics, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reported substantial research activity, with MD Anderson conducting $1.9 billion in life sciences research in 2018 and receiving significant NIH funding in prior years.
Aug. 5, 2021 Realty News Report. Copyright 2021.
Photos by Ralph Bivins, Realty News Report. Copyright 2021.
For more about Texas real estate, read the book Houston 2020: America’s Boom Town – An Extreme Close Up by Ralph Bivins.
File: Texas A&M Breaks Ground