Trammell Crow, Daiwa House break ground on Houston spec Phase II

Trammell Crow Company and Daiwa House Texas have broken ground on Phase II of Blue Ridge Commerce Center, a 687,000-square-foot speculative industrial development about two miles south of Houston's Beltway 8. The three buildings will each span 182,000 to 303,000 square feet. They occupy 40.9 acres at the northeast corner of Fort Bend Parkway and McHard Road. Delivery is expected in spring 2027, according to Connect CRE. Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. is providing the construction loan; Seeberger Architecture designed the phase and E.E. Reed Construction is the general contractor. CBRE's Cape Bell and Jason Dillee will market and lease both phases.

Phase I, delivered last fall, totals 1,350,559 square feet. It has five buildings. Three have sold to owner-occupants, and a fourth is fully leased. That leaves one 157,626-square-foot front-load building still on the market.

Owner-occupant sales remove buildings from the leasing market for good. Because they close rather than lease, they set a hard price for the site — better evidence for a lender than a stack of signed leases. Three such sales in under a year give a construction lender underwriting data it can act on. They also establish the comparable for Phase II's eventual pricing.

The financing from SMBC is a statement in itself. The loan covers unleased speculative buildings, so it is underwritten against projected absorption rather than signed leases. That makes the bank's participation effectively a market bet on Fort Bend County. The lender's presence alongside Daiwa House's Texas arm also gives the deal a cross-border character.

Together, the phases push the venture past 2 million square feet. Phase II is unleased, and the remaining Phase I building is still available. The project adds to Houston's industrial pipeline, where speculative deliveries keep testing whether user demand can keep pace. Phase I's absorption justified a second act. The process is simple: build, absorb, build again. Spring 2027 decides if it holds.