The Dallas-Fort Worth area is poised to be the hottest real estate market in the nation for investment and development next year, according to a new Emerging Trends in Real Estate report, which compiled data from more than 2,000 industry experts.
But what does this mean for the North Texas region and the people who live there?
Nick Wooten, who covers real estate for The Dallas Morning News, said the DFW metroplex has ranked highly in this report for a number of years
“As you might expect, DFW has ranked in the top 10 in this report for the last six years. It was last No. 1 in 2019, and for 2024, experts put DFW right in third,” he said. “Nashville has been up towards the top of the list, and Phoenix as well.”
Wooten said several factors likely played into the Dallas-Fort Worth area making it to the top of the list in the report for 2025.
“Obviously, it’s the really strong post-pandemic recovery. It’s also size. We’ve seen the metro top 8 million people in the latest census estimates,” he said. “And there’s just continued demographic growth. Those are the three big factors that these experts cited.”
A lot of this growth has happened in the northern part of the region, Wooten said.
“The old joke is that we’re going to push all the way to the Oklahoma border, but it’s really starting to look like that,” he said. “I mean, obviously, you have the big semiconductor projects in Sherman with Texas Instruments. You’ve also got some movement out in Kaufman County, a lot of homes being built out that way.
“And then the industrial market in Fort Worth with Hillwood and Alliance is just booming. So you’ve got growth in a lot of different directions, I should say, in North Texas.”
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Wooten said the report, put out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute, matches what locals have probably noticed about growth in the area.
“I think we’ve all seen all the cranes going up across downtown, uptown, all parts of the Metroplex. It feels like we continue to grow. One of the figures they cite in this report is total employment growth, 11.2% since February 2020,” he said. “That’s the fourth fastest among all the metros in the nation. Only Raleigh, North Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina and Austin are putting up better numbers.”
Wooten said businesses will also be drawn to the area as the real estate market heats up.
“I think you’re going to see a lot of wheeling and dealing, a lot of movement, potentially a lot of headquarters shifts, companies bringing their workers to North Texas. Homebuilders are seeing big employment numbers and building more houses,” he said. “Just the continued growth of DFW as we push towards maybe the third largest metro in the country by the end of the century.”
And it’s possible home prices will rise, too, though Wooten said the housing market has been hard to predict lately.
“We’ve seen mortgage rates go up despite the Fed cutting rates last month. And there’s a ton of supply on the market – I mean, levels that we haven’t seen in 12, 13 years here in DFW. But there’s just no movement. Prices are pretty flat,” Wooten said. “You’re not seeing sales change a lot. I think a lot of people are still sitting on the sidelines trying to figure out what’s going to happen in 2025.
“Really, there’s a ton of factors at play there. And, you know, the continued economic growth is just one layer to that. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the future.”
