In August 2025, MetroNational became the sole owner of an office tower that barely had anyone in it. The building at 990 Town and Country Blvd is fifteen stories and 442,042 square feet, finished in 2022 as Marathon Oil's new headquarters. When ConocoPhillips absorbed Marathon in a $22.5 billion merger and cut the workforce that once filled the tower, the building emptied out fast. MetroNational bought it anyway, in what the company called its largest acquisition in a decade, and set out to lease it floor by floor to multiple tenants instead of one.
In a report by Bisnow, MetroNational president Scooter Hicks described the logic this way: "With near-total vacancy, 990 Town and Country represents a unique value-add opportunity to strategically expand our footprint." That statement only makes sense if the buyer believes Houston's office vacancy headline, the one every investor quotes, doesn't describe the ground this tower sits on.
A Tower Built for One Company, Bought to Hold Many
The building sits on a 3.4-acre site at the gateway to CityCentre, less than a mile from MetroNational's flagship Memorial City development, and was designed by the Houston firm Munoz + Albin. For a decade, MetroNational had made no acquisition of this size outside its own Memorial City footprint. Buying a newly constructed, nearly empty Class AA tower and converting it to multi-tenant use is not a passive hold. It is a bet that demand will show up in this specific location even while it stays absent elsewhere in the city.
That bet did not stay isolated. Soon after closing on the Marathon tower, MetroNational also purchased the 309,144-square-foot retail component of CityCentre, the open-air shopping district next door, giving the same owner control of the office tower, the retail underneath it, and the mixed-use center around it.
The Vacancy Number That Doesn't Describe This Block
Houston's citywide office availability, a measure that counts space landlords are marketing ahead of lease expirations as well as empty space, stood at 26.6 percent in the second quarter of 2026, per Houston.org's office market update. That number gets repeated in every market summary, and it is accurate. It is also close to useless for judging a single building or a single owner's portfolio.
The same Houston.org data breaks the city's office stock into two very different markets sitting on top of each other. Buildings delivered since 2011 averaged 15.2 percent vacancy in the second quarter of 2026. Buildings built before that averaged 28.0 percent. Houston's office problem is concentrated in aging inventory, not spread evenly across every address. A 442,042-square-foot tower built in 2022 does not carry the same risk profile as a 1980s building with the same square footage, even if both currently sit empty. One is empty because a single corporate tenant left. The other is often empty because the building itself has stopped competing.
MetroNational's own announcement of the Marathon tower purchase described the Katy Freeway East submarket, which includes Memorial City and CityCentre, as running with single-digit vacancy and consistent leasing velocity. That is a claim from the buyer, not an independent audit, but it lines up with the citywide flight-to-quality pattern Houston.org documents. A landlord willing to buy newer stock in a walkable, amenity-dense submarket is making a different wager than one holding onto commodity Class B space in a weaker corridor.
One Owner, Several Parcels, One Plan
The Marathon tower and the CityCentre retail purchase are pieces of a larger pattern. MetroNational is also partnering with Radom Capital, the developer behind M-K-T Heights and Montrose Collective, on Greenside, a 35,000-square-foot adaptive reuse project converting former warehouse space at 1085 Gessner into retail, restaurants, offices, and wellness tenants around an acre of green space. Austin-based Michael Hsu Office of Architecture handled the design, and the project delivered its first spaces to tenants this past spring.
At the same time, MetroNational has filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for an $8.8 million redevelopment of Memorial City Mall itself. The scope covers roughly 216,000 square feet of interior space and another 190,000 square feet of exterior space near the mall's former Sears wing, demolished back in 2020. Gensler is the architect of record. Construction began May 1, 2026, with parking and access improvements set to wrap by January 2027 and the broader project finishing in April 2027, according to reporting from the Houston Chronicle. The mall's anchor tenants, Macy's, Dillard's, JCPenney, and AMC, are not part of this phase and will stay open through construction.
Several related projects, one owner, a connected strategy. That is a different risk structure than a submarket where five unrelated landlords are each deciding independently whether to reinvest or coast. When one company controls the office tower, the retail center, the adaptive reuse project, and the anchor mall within the same half mile, capital improvements in one asset tend to support leasing in the others. A tenant signing at the Marathon tower benefits from Greenside's restaurants opening nearby in the same year. A retailer at CityCentre benefits from the mall's new entrance and reworked parking landing on schedule.
What This Means If You're Signing a Lease or Writing a Check Here
Leasing activity in this immediate cluster backs up the thesis. In the first quarter of 2026, VoltaGrid signed a 60,000-square-foot lease at 920 Town and Country Blvd, in the same office corridor as the Marathon tower. That is a real tenant committing real square footage in a submarket the city's headline vacancy number would suggest tenants are avoiding.
For a tenant evaluating space in Memorial City or CityCentre, the practical question is not "what is Houston's office vacancy rate." It's who owns the building you're touring, what else that owner controls nearby, and whether their capital is moving toward the property or away from it. A near-empty building owned by a firm actively buying more real estate in the same three blocks carries a different set of risks than a near-empty building owned by someone waiting out a lease expiration.
For an investor or owner-user weighing acquisition here, the timeline matters as much as the price. Anyone closing on a deal near Memorial City Mall in 2026 should plan around construction traffic and parking reconfiguration through January 2027, with the fuller redevelopment finishing that April. Retail tenants signing new leases in the mall or at CityCentre should ask directly whether their space falls inside the demolition footprint or outside it, since the anchors stay open but the surrounding tenant mix will shift during the buildout.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Sign
Does the Memorial City Mall construction affect stores that are already open? The anchors, Macy's, Dillard's, JCPenney, and AMC, are excluded from this phase. Parking and access changes are the part current shoppers and tenants will notice first, expected to wrap by January 2027.
Is Memorial City's office vacancy actually lower than the rest of Houston? MetroNational has described the Katy Freeway East submarket as running single-digit vacancy in its own announcements. Independent citywide data supports the broader pattern behind that claim: newer buildings across Houston run far below the vacancy rate of older stock, and this submarket's inventory skews newer.
Who should a tenant or investor be asking about ownership concentration? Whoever is marketing the space. Ask directly whether the landlord owns adjacent parcels and what capital projects are underway or filed nearby. That answer tells you more about the building's trajectory than the metro vacancy rate ever will.
If you're weighing a lease, an acquisition, or an exit anywhere in Memorial City or CityCentre, Aspire CRE can walk through what these overlapping redevelopment timelines mean for your specific building, your specific tenant mix, and your specific numbers.
