Harkinson Making First Major Office buy in Decades

Harkinson Investment Corporation, an Addison, Texas-based real estate investment trust, made their biggest purchase in around a decade, acquiring the 229,000-square-foot office building at 2600 North Central Expressway in Richardson.

The purchase is Harkinson’s largest office investment in more than 25 years according to Bisnow, who cited a press release from the firm. Harkinson purchased the nine-story building from a subsidiary of Japan-based Kajima Corporation. While financial details of the acquisition were not available, company executives at Harkinson said in the statement that Class A office space is available for prices that were previously unimaginable.

Harkinson’s last large office building was the 285,000-square-foot building at 4455 Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway that the company sold off in 2015. Their latest is 92 percent leased, according to the outlet, and has a 5.2 year weighted average lease term, strengthened by most of the building’s tenants renewing their leases from 2022. The purchase is set to further bolster an already-strong “Telecom Corridor” in Richardson, which lies along Hwy 75 in the North Dallas suburb.

“Nearly the entire building has effectively been re-leased since the pandemic,” Harkinson told the outlet.

As for the rest of the leasing, Forge Commercial Real Estate was retained due to their success in decreasing the building’s vacancy rate in the wake of the pandemic. The occupation numbers for the building were at around 50 percent previously.

Recent activity in Richardson includes the addition of Celestica, a data center infrastructure company from Canada, who signed a 10-year lease for a 600,000-square-foot hub at 2801 Telecom Parkway, with plans in place to expand it into 343,000 square feet of additional office space. The city of Richardson greenlit a $3 million tenant improvement grant for the company, which is expected to create 2,300 additional permanent jobs over the next two years.

— Hunter Cooke