Texas Market Reports

By Taylor Williams DALLAS — It’s an exceptionally challenging time to be developing retail space in the metroplex. Pick your poison: Interest rates that have tripled in two years, restricted proceeds from lenders, longer entitlement and permitting times, limited land for new projects. Between all these barriers to growth, the deck is seemingly stacked against brick-and-mortar retail developers these days, despite the fact that in Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), occupancy is very high and population growth shows little sign of slowing. Of course, each of those factors is exacerbated with large-scale developments. More land and rentable square footage require the raising of more debt and equity, which translates to heftier interest and dividend payments, respectively. If the site is an assemblage, then predevelopment is more time-consuming, and with the push outward to new suburban paths of growth, those sites may not already be zoned for retail. If rents aren’t trending upward, those factors alone can kill a project in its infancy. Editor’s note: InterFace Conference Group, a division of France Media Inc., produces networking and educational conferences for commercial real estate executives. To sign up for email announcements about specific events, visit www.interfaceconferencegroup.com/subscribe. For all these reasons, some owner-operators see opportunity in building smaller …

By Taylor Williams Industry professionals who hail from and work in San Antonio often describe the city’s economy and real estate scene as steady and healthy in a sort of unspectacular way. Rarely does any commercial sector in San Antonio achieve the high highs and low lows of gateway coastal markets. Further, the market’s quiet consistency has come to stand out as its neighbor up the road, Austin, has exploded as a tech hub in the past decade, bringing with it fervent building booms that still can’t put a dent in the skyrocketing cost of living. Yet this same quality that in years past caused major retailers and restaurants — and investors — to pass on San Antonio is now a primary force that attracts them to the Alamo City, at least according to some local industry experts. Some of these individuals elaborated on the trend at the inaugural InterFace San Antonio retail conference, which took place on April 4 at the Hilton Palacio Del Rio hotel. Bethany Babcock, principal and co-owner of full-service firm Foresite Commercial Real Estate, was the first industry expert who addressed the market’s evolution in the post-COVID era. “We noticed at the last couple trade …