Levcor’s Houston Shopping Center Lands Five Tenants

Larry Levine’s Levcor has secured a quintet of leases at its Post Oak Plaza shopping center in Uptown Houston.

The tenants have taken a combined 26,500 square feet, upping the property’s occupancy rate to 98 percent. The tenants include restaurants Local Foods, Tacodeli and Rakkan Ramen, as well as luxury mattress company Saatva and appliance brands Bosch, Thermador and Gaggenau.

The appliance showroom spans more than 14,000 square feet and will be the first in Texas. The other leases range from roughly 1,800 square feet to 4,000 square feet.

The batch of tenants brings the shopping center to 98 percent occupied and validates Levcor’s decision to redevelop the property, at the intersection of Post Oak Boulevard and San Felipe Road. Upgrades to the shopping center took almost five years and have turned “one of the city’s most visible corners into a dynamic destination to dine and shop,” said Levcor vice president Sasha Levine. BRR Architecture handled the redesign.

More retail renovations are in the works nearby. The Galleria shopping center’s owner, Simon Property Group, plans to make “transformative multimillion-dollar upgrades” this summer.

These plays come amid a strong Houston retail market, which showed resilience after the pandemic accelerated an increase of e-commerce and dealt a blow to shopping malls across the country. At the midway point of last year, Houston’s retail vacancy rate stood a few ticks below 5 percent for the fifth consecutive quarter, its lowest rate since 2017. Asking rents also rose 3.6 percent year-over-year.

Levcor, meanwhile, has been a major player in Houston real estate since the 1980s. It has developed, owned and operated over 25 million square feet of real estate across the nation since it was founded.

—Quinn Donoghue