Real estate professionals say a long-running rumor is now a sure thing — Exxon Mobil Corp. plans to build a large corporate campus near the town of Spring.
“Exxon Mobil’s campus is clearly happening,” according to Sanford Criner, an executive vice president with CB Richard Ellis Inc.
Criner’s declaration came during a Jan. 7 presentation at the real estate firm’s downtown offices.
He declined to disclose the source of his information concerning Exxon’s project slated for the west side of Interstate 45, where the Hardy Toll Road intersects the freeway.
“It is uniformly believed in the real estate community that Exxon is developing a new campus,” Criner said. “That’s a huge story.”
Speculation has ebbed and flowed over the past few months that the world’s largest publicly traded international oil and gas company planned to buy roughly 400 acres to consolidate thousands of employees from Houston and Fairfax, Va.
In the Houston area alone, Irving-based Exxon has people working in more than two-dozen locations who are expected to share a single address in the future.
Criner said the relocation would be a big blow to the Greenspoint area, where Exxon leases 2 million square feet of office space for 6,000 employees. Employees downtown and those in company-owned buildings would not move to the new location.
In attendance at the CBRE meeting was Jack Drake, president of the Greater Greenspoint Management District.
When asked to comment on Exxon’s exit, Drake wryly replied that George Bush Intercontinental Airport is not leaving Greenspoint, and neither are Beltway 8 and Interstate 45.
Covert developments
Exxon keeps a tight lid on information regarding real estate plans, and would not comment for this story.
The conglomerate with an estimated 104,000 employees worldwide avoids discussion of operational activities.
In deference to Exxon’s covert character, businesspeople with knowledge of the company’s plans would only speak off the record.
Sources who received campus details directly from Exxon or others connected to the deal paint a picture of an elaborate complex north of Houston, possibly with several million square feet of space.
“They’re doing it,” one well-placed source states emphatically.
In other recent developments cited by sources:
• Exxon sent a company e-mail informing employees that the company is conducting an analysis of U.S. office buildings, but no decision on a Harris County campus is anticipated until the study is complete in 2011.
• Deed records show an entity purchased a large amount of acreage late last year at the Interstate 45 site, bordered on the north by Spring Creek. The entity, believed to be connected to Exxon, purchased 400 acres of vacant land from New York-based Coventry Development Co., which owned as much as 1,500 acres in the area through affiliate Springwoods Realty Co.
Executives with Coventry, which developed the local Baybrook Mall, did not respond to phone calls regarding the land.
Activity on the potential site indicates development is in the offing, whether it involves Exxon or not.
Harris County Improvement District No. 18 was created in 2009 by the Texas Legislature for the 1,500-acre site west of Interstate 45 at the Hardy Toll Road.
Trey Lary, an attorney with Allen Boone Humphries Robinson LLP, says his firm was hired by Coventry to create the district in the last legislative session.
He notes such a district is the common structure set-up for land development in Texas.
The CIA angle
Movement is also stirring in Virginia, where some 7,000 former Mobil Corp. employees in Fairfax could be part of the local consolidation.
Mobil moved corporate headquarters from New York to the Fairfax campus in 1987, prior to merging with Exxon.
According to the Washington Business Journal, Exxon employees in Virginia reportedly told real estate sources there that the company has been moving senior-level employees from the 130-acre Fairfax campus to Texas.
Real estate brokers in the Fairfax area also say Exxon employees have told them the Central Intelligence Agency is interested in acquiring the site, with its large tree-lined setbacks from the road.
Other sources say the CIA angle is a long-standing urban myth at Exxon.
While the latest Exxon campus consolidation rumors appear to have legs, an earlier effort failed to come to fruition.
In the early 1980s Exxon planned to consolidate employees in Conroe, but shelved the project after the oil bust.
jdawson@bizjournals.com • 713-395-9631 Melissa Castro and Sarah Krouse at the Washington Business Journal, an affiliated publication, contributed to this story.