Bulldozers are finally moving dirt at 4100 Westheimer Road, where a 17-story office tower that has sat on the drawing board since 2022 began construction this week. Stonelake Capital is building 100 Park Place near Highland Village as a speculative project, betting that Houston's office market has turned a corner even though the city's vacancy rate remains elevated.
A Tower Years in the Making
As first reported by Chron, construction at the site officially began on Tuesday, following a CBRE-tracked groundbreaking on September 30. The project has faced repeated delays: it once targeted a groundbreaking in summer 2023, then construction was expected to start in the first quarter of 2025, and new fencing went up around the site back in December 2024 without work following. According to Realty News Report, Stonelake Capital is now moving forward on the roughly 17-story, 250,000-square-foot building as a speculative project, meaning it is not waiting to hit the customary 50% preleasing threshold that typically precedes new office construction.
The site sits along Westheimer Road near Mid Lane, just west of the Highland Village shopping center and east of the River Oaks District, per the same outlet. The tower will rise two stories taller than Stonelake's neighboring 200 Park Place, a 15-story building the company completed in 2022 at 4200 Westheimer Road, and 100 Park Place sits directly across the street from JLL and Stonelake's offices there, according to Chron's reporting.
Financing and Design Details
Bank OZK, formerly known as Bank of the Ozarks, is financing the new building, Realty News Report notes. JLL is handling leasing, with Chrissy Wilson and Matt Pruitt representing the brokerage, according to Bisnow. Chrissy Wilson told Realty News Report that initial market response has been promising, pointing to the scarcity of new office space in the Galleria area as a selling point for prospective tenants.
The design calls for eight office floors stacked above seven levels of parking, with ground-floor retail space and a ninth-floor amenity level, Bisnow reported. That amenity floor is planned to include an outdoor terrace, conference center, fitness center and tenant lounge. Chron's reporting adds further brochure specifics: an open-air conference center, a fitness center with showers and lockers, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and a 4,700-square-foot terrace. JLL is marketing office space across the building's ninth through 17th floors, while plans also call for about 12,000 square feet of retail, per Chron.
Cost and Timeline Questions Linger
Matt Pruitt told Realty News Report the project is scheduled to deliver in the first quarter of 2028. That timeline, however, does not match an older state filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which lists a September 2021 start date, a June 30, 2025 completion date and an estimated project cost of $1.95 million — figures that predate the current construction start and do not reflect the project's present schedule or budget. A separate 2022 filing had estimated the project's cost at $60 million. Stonelake Capital Partners did not immediately respond to Chron's request for an updated cost or timeline, leaving the discrepancy between those older estimates and the current plan unresolved.
A Soft Market, But Not Everywhere
The building is rising into a Houston office market still working through a glut of empty space. Realty News Report cited citywide vacancy at about 25% as of early October, while CRE Daily put Houston's vacancy rate at 24.1% as of July, up 330 basis points over the prior 12 months. The Greater Houston Partnership tracked a related but distinct measure, office availability, at 26.6% in the second quarter, down from a peak of 28.7% in the third quarter of 2023.
Newer buildings are faring far better than the rest of the market. The Partnership's data shows buildings delivered since 2011 carried an average vacancy rate of 15.2% in the second quarter, compared with 28.0% for older stock — a gap that helps explain why developers keep betting on new, amenity-heavy towers even amid a soft citywide number. Average gross asking rents in Houston climbed to $31.10 per square foot in the second quarter, up roughly 8.1% year-over-year, the Partnership reported, and the market posted 395,994 square feet of positive net absorption over the same period.
Investment activity has held up too: CRE Daily reported $1.5 billion in Houston office sales during the first seven months of 2026, ranking the city sixth among the top 25 U.S. markets. But new speculative construction remains rare. CRE Daily counted only about 2.3 million square feet under construction across 21 projects by the end of July, with just 703,384 square feet of new starts and little additional speculative space remaining underway — context that underscores how unusual Stonelake's bet on 100 Park Place is for the current cycle.
Other Projects Rising Nearby
Stonelake is making a similar wager outside Houston. The firm broke ground on a 17-story office tower at 2626 McKinney Avenue in Uptown Dallas, a project that includes roughly 173,000 to 174,000 square feet of office space and 7,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, according to Urbanize Dallas. That tower closed a construction loan from Bank OZK and is expected to be completed in roughly 19 months, with tenant move-ins beginning in the fourth quarter of 2028, the outlet reported.
Elsewhere in Houston, other projects point to a market that still finds room for new office space when the numbers work. Realty News Report noted a 127,000-square-foot building under construction in Autry Park that was already 95% preleased as of July, and Southern Land was developing about 100,000 square feet of office space on Kirby Drive south of Westheimer. Those projects, along with Hines' 47-story, 1 million-square-foot Texas Tower downtown — completed in December 2021 and now 99% leased, per Realty News Report — suggest that well-located, modern buildings can still find tenants even as older Houston office stock struggles to fill space.
