Quantic Wenzel Fills 75% Of Austin Office Building

Austin’s office market is starting to string together some wins after a brutal stretch during the initial years of the pandemic.

Austin-based Quantic Wenzel, a producer of ultra-low phase noise crystal oscillators, is expanding its Austin footprint. The tech designer and manufacturer leased 45,300 square feet at the Kramer 1 office building in North Austin, the Austin Business Journal reported, citing first-quarter reports from Partners and Newmark.

CBRE’s Bo Beacham, John Barksdale, Mark Emerick and Kyle Lewis handle leasing at the site. Appraisal district records show the landlord is Adler Kawa Real Estate Advisors, a joint venture between Adler Group, Kawa Capital Partners and Ganot Capital.

This was the second-largest office lease of the first quarter, trailing IBM’s 50,000-square-foot lease at Karlin Real Estate’s Parmer Impact Labs in Northeast Austin, according to the reports.

Kramer 1, which is part of a five-building office complex, is a stone’s throw from Quantic Wenzel’s office at 2215 Kramer Lane. The company’s new lease accounts for roughly 75 percent of the 61,000-square-foot building, constructed in 1999.

Austin’s office sector still has a way to go on its path to recovery from the pandemic, which ignited the remote-work era and subsequently drove up vacancies to historic highs. Yet, the future is starting to brighten up.

While Austin’s office vacancy rose to 21.8 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, new leases totaled 1.3 million square feet, the highest level since the second quarter of 2022, according to JLL.

Signs of life are even showing downtown, where the struggles are most glaring. The Republic, an 816,000-square-foot tower that’s slated to open next year, just scored leases from law firms Kirkland & Ellis and O’Melveny and Myers, totaling 165,000 square feet.

Furthermore, telecommunications company Cisco Systems recently leased 27,400 square feet in the 16-story Horizon Bank building at 600 West Fifth Street, putting another dent in downtown’s mountain of empty office space.

—Quinn Donoghue