Exxon Mobil 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, giving the energy giant time to make its corporate move to its campus near Houston.
Capital Commercial Investments, based in Austin, Texas, closed on the deal Friday. An Exxon Mobil spokesman confirmed to CoStar News that the real estate deal has closed. Terms of the highly anticipated sale of the energy giant's nearly 300-acre campus in Irving were not immediately available.
Exxon Mobil 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. Exxon Mobil 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 Exxon Mobil 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."
At the time Exxon Mobil listed its headquarters, Irving officials said 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.
Meanwhile, the buyer Capital Commercial has a history of purchasing former single-tenant office campuses — often what it considers undervalued real estate — and converting those properties to new uses. In recent years, the firm has purchased the former J.C. Penney campus, a former Kohl's campus and the former American Airlines campus in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
This time, it appears the real estate investment firm is considering the development of a luxury, master-planned project, according to one of the firm's executives.
"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 Exxon Mobil 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 $48.1 million, according to the Dallas Central Appraisal District.
The city of Irving has been home to Exxon Mobil 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.
Much like that move three decades ago, Exxon Mobil's move to the Houston region will help the company save on costs, including "nearly $2 billion of structural efficiencies in 2021" on top of $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 $6 billion of structural cost savings per year by 2023, relative to 2019," it said.
For the Record
A JLL team led by Michael Swaldi represented Exxon Mobil in the deal.