Dallas-based developer Provident Realty Advisors enters Houston industrial market with $124M project
July 18, 2023
Nine months after it announced the establishment of a Houston office, Dallas-based real estate development and investment company Provident Realty Advisors Inc. is getting ready to pour concrete for its first industrial project in the region.
Port 99 will be a two-building, 1.28 million-square-foot distribution center on 104 acres between the Grand Parkway and FM 2345 just outside Baytown. The company purchased the land from Bryan Teel in late April and promptly started site work, according to Justin Tunnell with the Houston office of California-based Lee & Associates, which is in charge of leasing the buildings.
The $124 million project is slated to be completed in the second quarter of next year. It was designed by Irvine, California-based Ware Malcomb. Houston-based Angler is the general contractor.Port 99 will consist of a 1.03 million-square-foot cross-dock warehouse with 40-foot clear height and a 255,960-square-foot front-load building with 32-foot clear height. The project will have a combined 271 dock-high doors and six grade-level doors as well as parking for 900 trailers and 566s car.
The buildings could each be leased by a different company, or one tenant could take up the entire development, Tunnell said. If necessary, the buildings could be divided into several tenant spaces.
“We'll chase two big companies right out of the beginning,” Tunnell said. “But towards the end, if … there's two 500,000-square-foot users and we can get that deal done, we will do that deal for sure.”
Marketing efforts began in late May, and “activity has been pretty good,” Tunnell said, despite a slowdown from the explosive growth of industrial activity in the past three years.
“As people want to bring back manufacturing, they want to bring back their supply chain, they want to do more warehousing, they want to do more ‘just in case,’ not just ‘just in time,’ they want to have some additional product on hand in case the supply chain breaks down like it did during Covid,” he said. “That's pushing for a … bigger need of distribution space. Those are the people that we're targeting.”
The project is a few miles north of the massive TGS Cedar Port Industrial Park and across the highway from AmeriPort Industrial Park. It’s also in an area — strategically located near the Port of Houston, along the Grand Parkway and just south of Interstate 10 — that is in high demand for industrial development.
“Larger pieces of land that are not encumbered by floodplain, by pipelines (or) by access problems is becoming harder to come by,” Tunnell said.
“There are very few sites left that aren't going to be extremely difficult to work with.”
This site, as well, included a large lake that first needed to be drained and backfilled with dirt, he said.
Provident Realty Advisors got into the industrial real estate market six years ago and has several industrial projects in the Dallas area, but Port 99 will be its first in Greater Houston. The company’s portfolio includes all types of commercial and residential real estate, including office, multifamily, single-family, hospitality, medical and self-storage.
Local projects include The Grid, a mixed-use development on a former Texas Instruments campus in Stafford, and The Star, a luxury apartment complex in the former Texaco building downtown.
“We are so pleased to add Port 99 to our project portfolio,” said Christen Vestal, director of development and acquisitions for Provident Realty Advisors. “We develop to deliver results, and I have no doubt Port 99 will do just that for a number of industrial clients.”
The company hired Vestal last November to lead the new Houston office, its first location outside of Dallas. Vestal was previously with Houston-based Vigavi, and her career has focused primarily on industrial development.
“In the midst of debt and equity tightening, Christen did a fantastic job putting together the finances while other developers had to fold,” Tunnells said. “Because of this, Port 99 will be one of the few deliveries of this size happening in 2024 — and maybe 2025. This puts us in a great position.”