Houston: Lower rent in Exxon Mobil’s vacant Greenspoint office

​​HOUSTON – Champions Pipe & Supply will fill a bit of space vacated by Exxon Mobil Corp. in Greenspoint, a market in north Houston with an abundance of available office space.

The global distributor of drill pipe and supplies has leased 19,457 sf at 4 Greenspoint Place at 16945 Northchase Dr.

The 23-story, 403,384-sf building is part of Greenspoint Place, a 36-acre office and retail development owned by Hines and the General Motors Pension Fund. Located just north of Beltway 8, the complex surrounds the 480-room Hilton Houston North hotel.

Champions Pipe & Supply is relocating within Greenspoint from 2 Northpoint. New amenities at the complex, including a 7,000-sf fitness center and a 10,000-sf conference center, were draws.

Exxon Mobil, which is consolidating most of its Houston offices to its new 3 million-sf campus in Springwoods Village, moved out of a portion of the 1.2 million sf it leased in Greenspoint Place last year. Its current leases there expire at the end of 2016 and the end of 2018.​

Exxon Mobil is one of three big energy companies that left large blocks of space in Greenspoint for new suburban buildings recently.

Southwestern Energy relocated to its new 515,000-sf headquarters building in Springwoods Village earlier this year. Noble Energy, which was headquartered in Greenspoint until 2012, now occupies a new corporate campus off Texas 249 and Louetta in northwest Houston.

This has helped push the vacancy rate for Class A office buildings in the North Belt/Greenspoint submarket to 31.3 percent in third quarter 2015, or 43 percent including sublease space, according to CBRE.

Class A rents in the Greenspoint Place complex range from $16 to $22 net per sf per year. That compares with $18 to $28 net for top buildings in the Galleria submarket.​