Houston’s 801 Travis Sells to Local Engineer for $12 Million

Has Houston’s office market bottomed out with the sale of 801 Travis Street?

The beleaguered 222,000-square-foot office building traded after nearly a decade on the CMBS loan watchlist. Court records show the sale was approved in June for $12.1 million, or $54 per square foot.

The buyer is Rashmi Teja, an entity affiliated with Ramesh Gunda, the CEO of engineering company Gunda Corporation. Gunda did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

The seller is an affiliate of Dallas-based Lincoln Property Company.

JLL has been hocking the 21-story building that was built in 1981 and renovated in 2014 as a value-add investment opportunity since November.

At the time of the listing, it was 43 percent occupied. It had been half-filled for years, the Houston Business Journal reported, but occupancy dipped further when another major tenant, Maryland-based KCI Technologies, left in October. It had occupied 15,000 square feet.

The $30 million CMBS loan on the property, which was issued in 2013, had a balance of $24 million in July 2024. Around the same time, the building was valued at $19.9 million — half its 2013 value of $43 million.

The property’s loan has shown up on servicer watchlists since 2016, the report said. A receiver was appointed in February 2024 after the loan matured, court records show.

Lincoln Property Company bought 801 Travis in 2015 on behalf of a pension fund client from Atlanta-based Goddard Investment Group.

The building’s distress saga illustrates the broader issues in Houston’s office market, which is saddled with mostly vacant older office buildings that have become obsolete.

At the end of the first quarter, vacancy at properties built in the last 15 years averaged 14.9 percent, compared to 27.5 percent in properties constructed before 2009, according to Partners Real Estate.

Despite the challenges faced by 801 Travis, the submarket it’s located in, Houston’s CBD, is performing well. It was pulling the highest asking rents of any submarket in the city, at about $35 per square foot.