Old Halliburton site to get office, retail near Chinatown

A local investment group plans to add five stories of office and retail to the former site of a Haliburton campus near Houston’s energy corridor.

The near 50-acre parcel at 10200 Bellaire Boulevard, has sat empty since the multinational corporation’s massive office complex was demolished in November 2020. A company called 68B LLC, led by local real estate investor L. Lee Wong, purchased the land and will fund the construction of a seven-story, 269,000-square-foot office and retail building costing about $41 million, or $152 per square foot, according to a Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filing.

Construction will begin next June and last until December 2023.

Michelle Wogan of Transwestern, who is the listed broker, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Plans for a development called Park Eight, with office, retail and residential buildings, were posted anonymously to an online forum about Houston architecture, but plans for the site haven’t been confirmed.

The original Haliburton campus was completed in the late 1970s. The oil-field services company, notorious for its connection to former Vice President Dick Cheney, occupied it until 2015. The 585,000-square-foot building was home to nearly 3,000 employees at its peak, according to a Houston Chronicle report from 2020.

Halliburton has headquarters in Dubai and in Houston, off the Sam Rayburn Tollway, about 30 miles from the Bellaire Boulevard property.

The redevelopment site is a mile down the road from Houston’s Chinatown neighborhood, a largely residential area, with Asian businesses and the huge Hong Kong Food Market. Houston is home to the second-largest Indochinese population in the county behind Los Angeles, according to the city’s tourism website.

According to a recent CoStar report, many companies in Houston are ditching or downsizing their office space as remote work continues to become more prevalent. All told, 19 percent of Houston’s 350 million square feet of office space is sitting empty right now, with 9 million square feet available to sublet, according to CoStar.

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