You know you’re an Austin icon when you regularly grace the Austin City Limits stage.
Frost Bank Tower, with its striking art deco design resembling an owl at its peak, remains one of the most iconic additions to Austin’s skyline two decades after it was built. And in business terms, it’s still one of the darlings of the skyline even though many other office towers have risen since. Many say the tower marked a new standard for downtown office buildings, pushing developers to design more intentional and interesting towers compared to the concrete boxes that cropped up previously.
Right now, the 33-story tower’s occupancy rate of 95% is beating downtown’s average occupancy of 78% as clocked by CoStar, according to Travis Dunaway, principal with Endeavor Real Estate Group. Such a rate is the envy of many office land- lords who have been burdened by a record glut of empty space citywide.
Tenant turnover soon
Taking up almost all of the 535,078 square feet in Frost are big-name ten- ants such as PIMCO, Vista Equity Partners, Frost Bank, Ernst & Young, Reed Smith, Amherst, Maxwell Locke & Ritter and more. But change is afoot, said Anne Swift, principal with Endeavor Real Estate Group, which handles leasing at Frost. Soon, a quarter of its office space will be up for grabs as Kirkland & Ellis and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP leave the tower and migrate down Fourth Street to the under-construction Republic office tower. Vista Equity has committed to move out within the next few years.
As things stand, there’s 26,961 square feet available to lease in the tower, but in late 2025 an additional 124,750 square feet will hit the market. Frost’s floor plates range from 18,000 to 27,000 square feet, so there’s only about a single floor of space available for direct lease.
With its current vacancy rate of only 5%, Frost is on par with the new- er office stock built post-2014. Of 15 class A office buildings built since 2014, vacancy rates largely range from 0% to 15%, with three outliers ranging from 28% to 50% and a fourth, Innovation Tower, with 100% vacancy, according to Aquila Commercials’ third-quarter 2024 market report.
What’s clear is that Frost is per- forming much better than the majority of older office buildings down- town. Across 13 downtown office buildings built prior to 2014 — mostly from the early 1960s to the early 2000s — about 1.8 million square feet of space was available for direct lease in the third quarter, or about 31% of those buildings. Frost has faced some stiff competition for tenants in recent years — longtime prized tenants Heritage Title Company and the Winstead PC law firm recently moved to newer towers, touting their amenities and floor plans. But the building also can be a victim of its own success.
“The downside of being 95%-plus leased often means you can’t easily grow an existing growing tenant,” Dunaway said. “Vista Equity and Kirkland & Ellis are examples, as each needed more than double their existing footprints, which Frost Tower simply could not accommodate.”
Keeping up with the Joneses
A lot of the success in leasing the tower is the result of its features and amenities. “Building features that we all expect and take for granted today, like perfect column spacing, floor- to-ceiling glass, expansive ceilings, ample onsite parking, and executive level amenities like expansive conference and fitness centers — Frost Tower was delivering on par with today’s newest buildings, but 22-plus years ago,” said Costa Petrunoff, Managing Director of Investments at DivcoWest, the tower’s asset manager.
And those features have been continually updated throughout the tower’s life. The most recent lobby and amenity renovations, designed by Elliot March of London-based March and White Designs, began in 2020 and were completed in 2022.
“I’ll still never forget seeing the sauna in Frost Tower for the first time,” Dunaway said. “Frost Tower was pioneering on so many levels, which has allowed it to remain relevant and coveted, even today. But don’t mistake any of this for complacency. There is not a common area surface, amenity, or security feature within Frost Tower that hasn’t been redesigned or renovated within the past three years, ensuring Frost Tower’s future.”
Amenities at the tower include a 5,500-square-foot fitness club, lounge, conference facility, full-ser- vice bank, executive parking and on-site retail. Those retail options have been a draw for tenants. Houndstooth Coffee, Juiceland, SoulCycle, Modern Market and One Taco are on the ground level.
The tower has also received a number of recent designations and certifications putting it on par with new- er office stock. In the sustainability realm, it received a LEED Gold certification in 2019 and was Energy Star certified in 2008. For connectivity, the tower received a Wired Score Platinum designation, the highest ranking available. Finally, for health and wellness, Frost has received a Fit Well 2-star rating, scoring a 99 out of 100 in the walkability category and a 97 out of 100 for the biking category.
All of this combined — the tower’s unique design, its impressive tenant mix, the continual updates and the available amenities — have ensured that Frost Bank Tower remains an important part of downtown’s sky- line and economy, and could ensure the tower remains iconic for decades to come.
“Timeless is an overused adjective when describing architectural designs or finishes,” said Dunaway. “By definition though, Frost Tower is as timeless as it gets. Twenty years from today, that unmistakable crown lit up at night and as the backdrop of Austin City Limits stage, Frost Tower will still be unmistakably Austin. Who else can really say that?”
How the building was born
The tower’s story began in November 2001 when it became one of the first high-rise office buildings to break ground in the United States after 9/11, said Tim Hendricks, senior vice president and managing director at Cous- ins Properties Inc., the tower’s developer and original owner. It’s now owned by California State Teachers Retirement System.
“It was really very exciting,” Hendricks said of starting construction so soon after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. “The subtractors, the general contractors, the supplier — everybody kind of rallied around Frost Bank Tower.”
At that time, Austin was seen as more of a sleepy college town and state capital, and a new tower was an avenue to help it evolve into more of a business community. When Cousins first began looking at developing Frost, the developer realized that newer, modern office towers hadn’t been built downtown since the 1980s, Hendricks said.
“If somebody’s going to do a new, marquee, iconic tower, why wouldn’t it be us?” he said. And when it came time to design the building, Hendricks said the driving force was an intentional effort to develop the city’s most iconic tower.
One of the major iconic features of Frost, which was designed by Turan Duda of Duda Paine Architects, is the building’s crown, which resembles an owl. Hendricks dispelled the long-standing urban legend that the resemblance was an intentional design choice by a Rice University graduate, but did say the crown, which lights up the skyline at night and is constructed of multiple layers of glass, was key to helping stretch the tower out so it resembles a taller point tower instead of a more squat, boxy building.
Cousins paid $13.8 million in 2001 for the tower’s 1.7-acre site. The site’s appraised value is now about $336 million, according to Travis County.
STORY BY BY CODY BAIRD • [email protected]
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVE CREANEY • [email protected]