Real Estate Round-up

Gerald Hines' best customer re-ups, apartment rents rise & Firethorne gets salehappy

The Williams Tower is keeping its anchor tenant.

Photo by Ralph Bivins
Houston's Class A — higher-end apartments — have seen rates rise higher onaverage.

Photo by Ralph Bivins
Discovery at Shadow Creek Ranch in Pearland is one of the new apartment projectsthat opened in the Houston area this summer.But there aren't many more on tapnear the city.

Photo by Ralph Bivins
This has been Firethorne's best sales year since the community opened in 2005.

There are repeat customers. Then, there are repeat, repeat, repeat customers.

Rowan Companies has leased its office space from Gerald D. Hines since 1969. And Rowan is going to stay with Hines.

In fact, Rowan is Hines’ most loyal customer. And when you’ve been around as long as Hines, that’s saying a lot. Since Gerald Hines started his real estate development company in Houston in 1957, Hines has been landlord to thousands of tenants. Hines developed the Galleria retail center in Houston and hundreds of downtown skyscrapers, hotels, sports arenas and residential projects around the world.

“Of the millions of agreements we’ve signed with tenants in our firm’s 53-year history, this lease renewal is notable because Rowan has chosen to stay in a Hines building continuously since the late '60s,” says Jeff Hines, president of the real estate company.

In 1969, Rowan moved into Hines’ Post Oak Tower, 5051 Westheimer, and then moved to Hines’ Transco Tower (now Williams Tower) in 1990.

Rowan just renewed its 80,000-square-foot lease in Williams Tower building in the Galleria area, keeping its alliance with Hines alive for several more years. Rowan, an offshore drilling services company, has constructed about a third of the mobile offshore rigs in existence — in other words, they're a major player in the offshore industry.

The 64-story Williams Tower, the tallest Texas building not in a downtown area, was completed in 1983. One thing that makes it popular with tenants is its skywalk connection to the Galleria. That makes lunch hour shopping almost too convenient.

Williams Tower, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, is the key landmark on Houston’s suburban skyline. My only problem with it is the name. The building’s original name, Transco Tower, went away in 1999 after Williams bought the Transco Energy company. Williams Tower just doesn’t have the same ring to it. I’ve continued to call it the Transco building all these years and everybody always knows what I’m talking about.

Apartment City

Rents are going up as the Houston apartment market gets healthier. The rent increases aren’t enough to make apartment dwellers give up their morning cup of Starbucks. But on the average rents are creeping up.

The average Houston apartment unit rented for $761.73 per month in June, up from the average monthly rent of $750.80 in June 2009, according to O’Connor & Associates. That number includes all kinds of apartments — old and new projects. (For “Class A” apartments, which are the newest and the nicest in the best locations, the average monthly rent was $1,105.60 in June, O’Connor reported.)

Landlords have been able to elevate the rents over the last six months as the fundamentals of the Houston apartment market have improved, says Stacy Hunt of Greystar Real Estate Partners, a large apartment management firm.

Tighter lending requirements have made it tougher for many people to buy homes and that has helped the apartment market. “Young people can’t buy homes and they are having to stay in apartments longer,” Hunt says.

The occupancy rate for Houston’s apartments stood at 86.5 percent in June, up from 85.4 percent at the beginning of the year. And with the construction of new apartments tapering off, the Houston apartment market will be more in balance. Houston hasn’t had the big waves of foreclosure and vacancy that hurt apartment landlords in other cities.

“We are in better shape here than the rest of the country,” Hunt says.

Optimistic Home Builders

New home sales declined this summer in Houston – and across the nation. When the federal tax incentives for home buyers expired at the end of the spring, home sales dropped sharply.

But in Houston, home builders and land developers have been starting some residential projects that show signs of optimism about the future.

The latest of the optimistic announcements was made by the developer of Firethorne, a 1,400-acre project in the Katy/Fulshear area.

Work has just begun on Firethorne West, a 430-acre section of the master planned community that will create an additional 1,400 home sites.

Firethorne was started five years ago and 2010 has been its best year ever for new home sales, according to Wayne Meyer, general manager of the project. Firethorne registered 178 new home sales in the first seven months of 2010, a record pace for the community.

Ralph Bivins, former president of the National Association of Real Estate Editors, is editor-in-chief of RealtyNewsReport.com.

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Bang for Buck

Surprising suburb unlocks biggest apartments in Houston for $1,500

Photo by Matt Halls on Unsplash

Pasadena has the 6th roomiest apartments on a budget in Texas.

Budget-conscious renters searching for the roomiest apartments in the region should look no further than Pasadena. According to a new study, the east Houston suburb has the biggest apartments on a budget in the metro.

In 2026, Pasadena residents can rent a 1,125-square-foot apartment for $1,500 per month. That's enough space for a two- or three-bedroom unit, and it's four square feet bigger than what renters could get with the same budget last year.

RentCafe's annual report analyzes the places where renters can find the largest apartment sizes across 200 of the most populous U.S. cities for a monthly budget of $1,500. The price per square foot was calculated using the average apartment rent and size per city based on "multifamily properties" containing 50 or more units.

Pasadena offers the 6th most spacious apartments in Texas for $1,500, and Houston ranks 11th statewide.

Renters in Houston proper will net a 976-square-foot apartment for the same price in 2026, a size that has shrunk by more than 20 square feet since 2023.

Apartment sizes across Texas
For the second year in a row, the Rio Grande Valley is the region that has the most spacious apartments for a $1,500 monthly budget, RentCafe found.

McAllen leads the nation with the biggest apartment size – at 1,378 square feet – which is large enough for a three- or four-bedroom unit.

"With rents averaging just $993 and the typical apartment measuring 912 square feet, McAllen renters get a lot more space for their money than most Americans do within that monthly budget," the report said. "Still, that figure is down slightly from last year’s 1,393 square feet — a sign that even the most affordable markets are starting to tighten."

Brownsville, another city on the border located an hour east of McAllen, ranks fourth statewide with apartments spanning 1,213 square feet for the same budget.

These are the top 10 Texas cities that offer the biggest apartments for $1,500 in 2026:

No. 1 – McAllen (1,378 square feet)
No. 2 – Amarillo (1,237 square feet)
No. 3 – Lubbock (1,217 square feet)
No. 4 – Brownsville (1,213 square feet)
No. 5 – El Paso (1,128 square feet)
No. 6 – Pasadena (1,125 square feet)
No. 7 – Corpus Christi (1,115 square feet)
No. 8 – Killeen (1,058 square feet)
No. 9 – San Antonio (1,023 square feet)
No. 10 – Mesquite (988 square feet)

real estate apartments housing rentcafe study houston pasadena