Thor Sells Austin Office Property For $72M

The city of Austin picked up an office asset from Thor Equities Group.

New York-based Thor sold the 250,000-square-foot property at 5202 Ben White Boulevard for $71.5 million, according to a news release. That’s about $286 per square foot.

The city of Austin had been leasing the property, along with the Mexican Consulate.

It is 100 percent leased, located near the Oracle Austin headquarters and a few miles from downtown. The building was redeveloped with modern amenities in 2018, a year before Thor acquired it.

“Strong tech leasing momentum” keeps demand high in Austin, Thor CEO Joe Sitt said.

“Austin’s submarkets are among the most active in the Americas, across all sectors, and we look forward to uncovering new opportunities and investing further in the thriving city,” Sitt said.

The transaction extends Thor’s selling spree in Texas. In 2022, the firm sold two industrial properties spanning 300,000 and 130,000 square feet in McKinney, near Dallas, for $35 million.

Also last year, Thor sold the 1 million-square-foot Arrive Upper Kirby mixed-use development in Houston for $182 million. That three-building property, at 3200 Kirby Drive, was Thor’s first Houston development, completed in 2018. At the time of sale, the residential portion was 91 percent leased, and the office portion was 100 percent leased.

The Ben White office building was built in the late 1970s and previously housed a semiconductor wafer fabrication plant. Transforming it into a multi-tenant office building proved to be difficult, due to its prior configuration and industrial use, according to the website of GSC Architects, the firm that redesigned the building.