About a year after billionaire Elon Musk moved the electric vehicle manufacturer’s headquarters to Austin, Tesla is building a new industrial complex west of Houston in a project that expands the electric vehicle maker’s interests in Texas.
A certificate of occupancy that had been issued by the city of Brookshire shows that Tesla will be occupying Building 9 at Empire West. Late last year, Tesla negotiated a lease for nearly 1.03 million square feet at 111 Empire West, a building that is a component of Brookshire’s 300-acre Empire West Business Park. As stated in the leasing paperwork, the structure is a warehouse with more than 300 trailer parking places, a significant truck court, and docking facilities that are designed to increase productivity while loading and unloading goods. But that seems to be where the specificities end. Both Tesla and the landlord/developer of the project, Stream Realty Partners (a commercial real estate services organization based in Dallas), have kept mum on the details.
The city of Austin has been widely regarded as Tesla’s stronghold in Texas thanks to the presence of the company’s giant Gigafactory that’s undergoing construction to expand from 4.3 million square feet to a whopping 5.6 million square feet. The construction of a sizable industrial complex in Brookshire would increase the little city’s visibility among industrial developers but, as we have reported before, these large facilities can be both a blessing and a curse.