Texas Teacher Retirement System pays $116.6 million for first stage of new Austin headquarters

The Teacher Retirement System of Texas has closed on the first of two office buildings it intends to buy in the mixed-use Mueller development in Northeast Austin, part of a plan it approved in September to spend up to $300 million on a new headquarters complex and move out of downtown. The state agency said it purchased the initial building, at 1900 Aldrich St., for $116.6 million from Shorenstein Properties. The retirement system has budgeted up to $21.5 million more to finish it out. Shorenstein is developing a second building nearby that the retirement system also has committed to buy. Its budget for that building, which won't be completed until 2024, is $161.9 million, including the price to buy it and to finish it out.

"The campus in the Mueller development ensures the (retirement system's) growing membership will have improved access to counseling staff and other services outside busy downtown Austin," Brian Guthrie, the agency's executive director, said in a written statement announcing the purchase of the initial building. The six-story building contains 236,000 square feet, with the retirement system owning all but about 26,000 square feet on the first floor that's intended for retail businesses. It expects to begin occupying the building in 2023. The purchase comes about two years after the retirement system scrapped a plan to address its office needs by moving one of its divisions into Indeed Tower, a recently completed 36-story office building on West Sixth Street in downtown Austin. That plan was called off by the retirement system's board in February 2020, after extensive but unsuccessful efforts by the agency to keep financial information regarding it secret — such as the amounts it had agreed to pay in rent at Indeed Tower.