Kirkwood Tower Sold Again in Under a Year

The sale of Kirkwood Tower in Houston appeared on The Real Deal’s 2025 list of biggest office sales in Houston. It should have appeared on the list twice.

The 280,000-square-foot office building at 11757 Katy Freeway, which faced foreclosure early last year, changed hands again in the last week of 2025.

Gemini Rosemont handed over keys to the Energy Corridor building in March to Apollo Global Management after defaulting on a $30.9 million loan from Voya Insurance. David Z. Mafrige Interests, a Houston-based firm that redevelops office and retail, purchased Kirkwood Tower from Apollo in December, according to a release from Stream Realty, which represented the buyer and handles leasing at the property.

In conjunction with the ownership change, Stream completed 150,000 square feet of lease transactions, bringing the building’s occupancy to 76 percent, it said in a release.

The 15-story office property sheathed in black glass was built in 1984 and renovated in 2015. The building is located along Interstate 10, about 17 miles west of downtown, in Houston’s Energy Corridor, which has become a popular office destination.

The availability rate in Houston’s office market was a tick over 26 percent at the end of the third quarter of 2025, according to the Greater Houston Partnership. Office availability peaked at the end of 2022 at a little more than 28 percent.

The flight to quality trend continues to tell the story of the Houston office market, with buildings completed in the last 15 years averaging under 15 percent vacancy while older buildings have, on average, nearly 28 percent vacancy, the report said.Houston’s Energy Corridor has become a resilient pocket of Houston’s struggling office market. The submarket saw a slew of leases in 2025, including SM Energy, which doubled its space at Granite Properties’ Eldridge One, at 777 North Eldridge Parkway, and Kansas engineering firm Black & Veatch, which landed $5 million in improvement dollars when it signed a lease for nearly 41,000 square feet of Mac Haik’s Energy Tower II at 11720 Katy Freeway.