Hillwood, Hines Take Advantage Of DFW Industrial Growth
Hillwood will build two new speculative industrial buildings totaling almost 1.3M SF at its AllianceTexas development as developers seek to meet demand in DFW's robust industrial market.
Alliance Center North 3 will offer 782K SF in Fort Worth, and Alliance Northport 1 will total 500K SF in Northlake.
“Hillwood has leased over 3M SF at AllianceTexas through the first half of 2018, so this is a continuation of our aggressive speculative building program designed to meet the needs of the market by having existing product on the ground ready to occupy,” Hillwood Senior Vice President Tony Creme said.
Industrial growth in Dallas-Fort Worth has been strong and steady, and the Alliance and South Dallas submarkets are reaping plenty of activity, according to preliminary second-quarter industrial numbers from Cushman & Wakefield.
When Hines acquired 125 acres in South Dallas in early 2017, the firm was drawn not only to the available land but also to the strategic access to several major interstates.
Now, a year and a half after that acquisition, the Houston-based developer is set to deliver its first South Dallas industrial property at the end of July: a 1M SF distribution center expandable to 1.5M SF.
Hines’ speculative development, called Southlink Logistics, is south of Interstate 20 and between interstates 35 and 45 as well as close to Union Pacific’s intermodal and FedEx’s large ground-transportation facility. The distribution center was built in an area known as the International Inland Port of Dallas, a 7,500-acre massive industrial region spanning the jurisdictions of five cities where most of the nation’s big industrial names have come to invest.
The South Dallas industrial submarket had 4.67M SF under construction during Q2, second only to the DFW Airport submarket, which has 5.4M SF under construction, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
Net industrial absorption in DFW reached 8.5M SF during the quarter, up substantially over the 4.7M SF absorbed during the year-ago quarter. Midyear absorption for 2018 was 11.7M SF compared to 10M SF a year ago.
Kohler’s moved into the most space during the quarter, 1.3M SF in the International Inland Port. The port also saw the biggest lease of the quarter, VM Innovations, which leased 416,891 SF in a spec building developed by Atlanta-based Core5 Industrial Partners.
Connor Tamlyn, formerly with CBRE, was brought on by Hines in the fall of 2017 as director to spearhead the Houston-based developer’s industrial expansion in Dallas-Fort Worth.
“I think the amount of growth to date [in the inland port] has been pretty remarkable and I expect to see that continue as logistics and supply chains become more efficient,” Tamlyn said.
Hines has industrial holdings in the South Dallas and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport submarkets with plans to expand its DFW industrial presence marketwide.
