2727 Kirby Condos: A Buyer's Guide to the Building on Kirby Drive

2727 Kirby is a residential condominium high-rise at 2727 Kirby Drive in Houston, in the Upper Kirby area just south of Westheimer Road. Its architects, Ziegler Cooper, describe a thirty-story tower whose form leans into Kirby Drive, on a site of less than an acre.

The building sits in the 77098 zip code, inside Houston's Inner Loop. Almost everything else a buyer wants pinned down about it, including how many homes it contains, what year it was finished and exactly how tall it is, is stated differently by different published sources. What is not in dispute is the storey count: every source checked says thirty. The building is full-service, with a concierge, valet parking and a large shared amenity floor above the garage, and the homes inside it are large by Houston condominium standards. Fewer than ten of them have sold in any of the last ten years, so this is a building people stay in rather than trade. If you want the published figures set beside their sources, the unit-count page lays them out.

2727 Kirby was designed by Ziegler Cooper Architects, the Houston firm whose own project page describes the thirty-story tower and its six-level garage. Wikipedia's article records Michael Atlas as the developer and gives a construction start of 2006, a cost of $120 million, and an opening in 2009.

Ziegler Cooper is the source worth going to first for the building itself, because the firm published its own description of it and that description has changed in a way that matters. An archived copy of the firm's project page as it read in 2010 describes a four-hundred-foot, thirty-story tower and states a unit count; the firm's current page describes the same thirty storeys and states none. The developer attribution and the cost are Wikipedia's, footnoted to Houston Chronicle reporting from 2011, and this site has not read the underlying articles. Both versions of the architects' own description are set out on the page about how many homes this building contains.

The shared amenity floor sits above the garage, and the architects describe it as thirty thousand square feet of entertainment, fitness, pool and spa space. Around it are a formal lounge with a catering kitchen and wine room, a casual lounge with billiards, an infinity pool, private cabanas and a spa.

Those descriptions come from the architects' own published account of the building: their current project page, and an archived copy of the page as it read in 2010. The archived version is the more detailed. It names the formal lounge as a dining space for parties of up to fifty, with a full catering kitchen, a climate-controlled wine storage room and a west-facing window over the Galleria and Post Oak area. It describes the casual lounge beside the pool with billiard tables and a bar, the pool itself surrounded by private cabanas, a hot tub and outdoor fireplaces, a lobby with wood-panelled walls and a suspended glass sculpture, and twenty-four-hour valet. What none of it tells you is which of these are configured that way today, or what any of them cost to run. The association's budget and resale certificate answer that, and this page has not read them.

The architects' 2010 description divides the homes into residences and estates, and says estate owners have an elevator that delivers them into their unit. That is the distinction buyers are reaching for when they ask which floor plans have a private elevator, and it is the architects' own language for it.

What that description does not do is say which homes are which, and no public source found for this page does. The same archived page gives a size range of 1,250 to 6,100 square feet across one-, two- and three-bedroom plans, with twelve-foot ceilings, fireplaces and a private terrace with an outdoor kitchen. A current building page publishes a different range, from about 2,400 to more than 4,500 square feet across two- and three-bedroom plans. Those two cannot both describe the same set of homes, and neither is a floor-plan schedule. The document that answers the question for a specific home is the recorded declaration together with its plats, which describe the boundaries of every unit; an agent working in the building should be able to put the plan for a specific home in front of you before a showing.

The architects describe private parking in a six-level garage with the amenity floor built above it, and twenty-four-hour valet. Beyond that, parking at this building is governed by the recorded condominium documents rather than by anything a listing shows, and those documents have been amended more than once.

The Harris County Clerk's real property index shows amendments to this condominium's declaration numbered as high as a tenth, and that tenth amendment is indexed as concerning the reallocation of parking spaces. Under the Texas Uniform Condominium Act the declaration is the instrument that describes a condominium's limited common elements and allocates each unit its interests, so a parking assignment lives in the declaration and in whichever amendment last changed it. If the value of a home here depends on its parking, whether that is a second space, a wider space or a location near the lobby, those are the documents to read, in order, before an offer. The recorded chain, and what it does and does not settle, is laid out on the unit-count page.

A sheet of glass fell from the seventh floor and damaged a car, and the investigation that followed found defective glass balcony railings along with problems in heating and air conditioning, fire sprinklers, plumbing, electrical systems and waterproofing. The engineering consultant that designed the repairs records all of it as rectified.

Curtainwall Design Consulting publishes its own account of the work on its project page. The firm investigated the existing glass guardrails and podium cladding, determined that the work was not code compliant, was retained as engineer of record to replace the materials and produce design drawings for the replacement guardrails, and also provided litigation support. Its project record gives a completion date of 2013 and states that all issues were rectified in 2014. Wikipedia records the same episode from the other side, as a suit brought by the building's ownership entity against the developer, citing Houston Chronicle reporting from 2011. For a buyer the useful question is not whether a tower of this age had defects, because many did, but what the association spent resolving them and what its reserves look like now. That sits in the association's own financial records, which this page has not seen.

The market-data source behind this site records a typical weekday drive of about fifteen minutes to downtown Houston and about ten minutes to the Texas Medical Center, with the Galleria about ten minutes away and the Energy Corridor about thirty. Those describe ordinary conditions rather than peak congestion.

Treat any published drive time as the middle of a wide distribution rather than a promise. The difference between leaving at seven and leaving at nine is larger than the difference between any two of the destinations above, and Kirby Drive itself is the constraint on most of these trips. The figures also measure driving, which is the realistic mode from this address. If a commute is central to the decision, drive it yourself in both directions at the hour you would actually travel, on a weekday, before you write an offer. And ask how the garage exit works at that hour, because at a full-service building with valet the first few minutes of the trip are part of it.

Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone number 19 covers part of Upper Kirby, and the City of Houston says it was created to fund improvements to traffic and storm-water infrastructure, the secondary street network, pedestrian safety and parks. The zone works alongside Harris County Improvement District number 3, the Upper Kirby Management District.

A reinvestment zone is not an extra tax and does not appear as a line on an owner's bill. What it changes is where a share of the growth in property tax revenue inside the boundary is spent: within the zone, on infrastructure, rather than in the city's general fund. The city's own record for this zone lists a project plan with four amendments, term extensions in 2011 and 2015, a boundary enlargement in 2015, and an interlocal agreement with Houston Independent School District. The management district beside it is a separate entity created under city ordinance and state law, with its own board that meets in public. Whether a particular address falls inside the zone is answered by the zone's boundary map rather than by a street name, and this page has not read the map.

Five, and all of them are obtainable. The resale certificate, the association's current budget and balance sheet, the assessment history, the minutes of recent board meetings, and the recorded declaration with its amendments. The first four come from the association; the last comes from the county.

Between them they answer nearly everything this site has had to leave open. The resale certificate states the assessment on the specific home, the reserves, the pending suits and the insurance. The budget says whether the fee covers the building's costs. The assessment history and the minutes say whether large repairs have been paid for or postponed. The declaration and its amendments describe the boundaries of the home, its allocated interests and its parking, which at this building has been formally reallocated at least once. None of these is discretionary or hard to get: the association is on a statutory clock for the certificate, and the county records are public. Start with the monthly fee and what it covers, which is where most of the cost of ownership here sits.

That depends on whether the project appears on HUD's list of approved condominium projects on the day you apply, and approval status changes. If a project is not on the list, federal regulation provides a separate route called Single-Unit Approval, which a lender pursues for one home rather than for the whole building.

The rule is at 24 CFR 203.43b. Single-Unit Approval applies to a home that is not in a project on the FHA-approved list, is not in a project HUD has identified as subject to an adverse determination, is in a completed project of at least five dwelling units, and is not a manufactured home. The same regulation lets HUD cap how many FHA-insured mortgages a project may carry under that route, within a stated range for projects of ten or more units. This page states nothing about this building's current status, because that is a fact with an expiry date on it. Check the list on the day, and ask a lender who has closed a single-unit approval before, because the paperwork is the lender's rather than the buyer's.