ExxonMobil Corp., the largest U.S.-based energy company, has sold its Irving, Texas, headquarters campus to a real estate investment firm in a sale-leaseback deal through next year, according to CoStar News.
The report said that this gives Exxon time to make its corporate move to its campus near Houston.
Capital Commercial Investments, based in Austin, Texas, closed on the deal on Friday. An ExxonMobil spokesman confirmed to CoStar News that the real estate deal has closed. Terms of the highly anticipated sale of its nearly 300-acre campus in Irving were not immediately available, the report said.
The energy giant plans to relocate from North Texas to its massive campus located about 25 miles north of Houston in Spring, Texas, in mid-2023. The move is expected to save the company billions of dollars in costs, the report. ExxonMobil, now with a major enterprise in Guyana’s waters, put its Irving campus on the market last winter.
“As we announced earlier in 2022, we are moving our corporate headquarters to our campus north of Houston,” Casey Norton, an ExxonMobil spokesman, said in an email to CoStar News. “The move will enhance collaboration and provide more opportunities to share expertise across the entire corporation as part of our strategy to better leverage corporate advantages to grow shareholder value. We greatly value our long history in Irving and Dallas, and appreciate the strong ties we have developed in the community”, he said.
ExxonMobil is also building headquarters for its operations in Guyana.
At the time ExxonMobil listed its headquarters CoStar News said that Irving officials had stated that the marketing of the campus offered a “blank slate,” to the city that touts itself as being “the headquarters of headquarters.” Eight Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Irving, including McKesson, Fluor Corp. and Kimberly-Clark.
“The former ExxonMobil site is one of the most exceptional infill locations in North Texas,” Robb Buchanan, an executive vice president of Capital Commercial, said on LinkedIn. “We look forward with engaging with the city of Irving and other parties to redevelop the campus into a luxury master-planned community and capture Fortune 500 companies that are continuing to move to Dallas-Fort Worth from out-of-state.”
Beyond sheer acreage for development, the ExxonMobil campus also houses the company’s current headquarters building. Built in 1995, it has nearly 360,000 square feet of space with an adjacent parking garage. The building was last appraised at US$48.1 million, according to the Dallas Central Appraisal District.
The city of Irving has been home to ExxonMobil since the company announced plans to relocate its headquarters from Manhattan to the Texas prairie in the late 1980s as a cost-cutting measure, following a similar move by retailer J.C. Penney, CoStar News said.
ExxonMobil’s move to the Houston region will help the company save on costs, including “nearly (US)$2 billion of structural efficiencies in 2021,” on top of US$3 billion the company saved in 2020, the company told investors this week. This would put the energy giant on track to “significantly exceed our goal of (US)$6 billion of structural cost savings per year by 2023, relative to 2019,” it said.