Dallas-Fort Worth Feasibility Studies

Apartments: strong absorption, and still more deliveries

Dallas-Fort Worth absorbs apartments at a pace few metros match, and it still has the most under construction. Cushman & Wakefield counted about 10,800 units absorbed in Q2 2026 alone, with stabilized vacancy down 30 basis points in the quarter to 9.6% and about 30,200 units under construction, down 21.3% from a year earlier ¹⁵. Grapevine was the tightest submarket at 5.5% ¹⁵. Apartments.com's all-property projection for the quarter was 12.6% ¹⁶, because it counts buildings still leasing up. Dallas delivered 35,000 apartments in 2024 ¹⁷, more than 4,000 market-rate units in Q2 2026 ¹⁹, and RealPage expects nearly 19,000 more over the next four quarters, with Fort Worth rent growth forecast below 1% ¹⁸. Build-to-rent adds about 3,700 units under construction in Dallas ²¹.

What a lender should take from this: absorption is real, but a new building's lease-up competes with every other building opening in its submarket over the same months. The study for a Dallas-Fort Worth apartment loan has to name those buildings, price the concessions they are offering, and set the subject's pace from comparable recent lease-ups (our note on absorption forensics shows how to read them). Building into that pipeline is not cheap: a Dallas apartment project carried $190 to $280 a square foot in hard cost in Q2 2026 ²², and Dallas construction prices rose 3.52% in the year to Q1 2026 ²³, so a late start pays more to compete for the same renters. Our multifamily feasibility page covers the method.

Industrial: balanced, with a large pipeline

Industrial vacancy sat between 8.1% and 9.3% in Q2 2026 depending on the broker: 8.1% at Cushman & Wakefield ⁹, 8.8% at Kidder Mathews ¹¹ and 9.3% at JLL, which also counted 31.2 million square feet under development ¹⁰. That range is balanced by Texas standards, and it contrasts sharply with Austin, where industrial vacancy runs at roughly twice its long-term norm. The risk here is not vacancy today but the speculative space still to deliver, so a study for an owner-user or small-bay project should identify the competing buildings within its submarket.

Hotels: the biggest pipeline in the country

Dallas carried the largest hotel construction pipeline of any U.S. market in Q2 2026, at 183 projects in Lodging Econometrics data ²⁴. RevPAR slipped 1.5% in Dallas and 0.8% in Fort Worth and Arlington over January to September 2025 ²⁵. Short-term rentals add a second layer of supply: Dallas listings grew 34.4% in the year to March 2025 ²⁶. A limited-service hotel study here has to list every pipeline project within the competitive set, test break-even occupancy against the new rooms (see the break-even occupancy trap), and treat 2026 World Cup demand as a one-time event, not a stabilized year. See our hotel feasibility page.

Medical, senior housing, storage and retail

Medical office vacancy was 11.4% in Q1 2026, after a peak near 12.0% in late 2025 ²⁸, and Dallas had 429,000 square feet of medical outpatient space under construction ²⁹. The metro had 316 urgent care centers, third among U.S. metros ³⁰. Senior housing penetration in Dallas was 13.3% in 2023 ³¹, and transactions averaged $187,375 per unit in the first three quarters of 2025 ³²; a new assisted living study must show unmet demand after that existing penetration (see assisted living and memory care). RV and boat storage is crowded: Yardi Matrix counts 130 properties on 1,488.91 acres, the largest inventory by acreage in its national sample, with supply up 28.3% over 36 months, 20 new properties in three years, rent growth of 1.9% and advertised rent of $5.69 per square foot ³³. Retail recorded one of the largest quarterly vacancy increases in the country in Q2 2026 ³⁴; Class A neighborhood centers traded at cap rates of 5.5% to 6.25% in H2 2025 ³⁵, and shopping center hard costs ran $210 to $345 per square foot ²². Self-storage supply per capita was not found and must come from a site-level census (see self-storage).

Dallas-Fort Worth has no single industry that can sink it, and that is the first thing a lender should credit. The Dallas Regional Chamber places American Airlines Group, Texas Health Resources and Walmart in its band of employers with 10,000 or more workers, but it publishes bands rather than ranked headcounts ⁷. Tarrant County's top-ten list, built from 2023 data of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, names DFW Airport at 14,000 employees, GM's Arlington Assembly plant at 10,512, Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth at 10,500, BNSF at 4,900 and UT Arlington at 4,383 ⁸. Those counts are three years old, so a study that relies on one of them should ask the employer for a current figure.

The metro is often sold to lenders as a corporate relocation story, and the population and payroll counts above are consistent with that. The research, however, holds no count of relocations, no list of new headquarters and no office absorption figure for 2025 or 2026. A study that leans on a specific move, such as a campus expected to fill a hotel's weekday rooms or to anchor a retail pad, has to document it: the company's announcement, the building permit, any incentive agreement with its job targets and clawbacks, and the move-in date. The office side of the story is also mixed. Dallas had 3,966 apartment units in its office-to-apartment conversion pipeline at the start of 2026 ²⁰, which tells a lender that some older office stock is being retired rather than leased (see what office repurposing means for a study).

Freight is the second pillar, and it is better documented. CBRE reports that Dallas-Fort Worth led U.S. industrial absorption in the first half of 2026 together with Houston and Phoenix ¹². Cushman & Wakefield puts the Alliance submarket in north Fort Worth first, with 3.9 million square feet absorbed year to date in Q2 2026, ahead of the East Dallas suburbs at 2.4 million, South Dallas at 2.0 million and South Fort Worth at 1.8 million ⁹. On October 14, 2026 the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the City of Fort Worth a $5 million INFRA grant for about 100 new truck parking spaces at a Pilot travel center on I-35 ¹³. For a lender, logistics growth pays twice: warehouse jobs, and the truck traffic that travel centers, fuel, truck parking and quick-service restaurants live on.

Health care rounds out the base. UT Southwestern's Texas Behavioral Health Center in Dallas adds 292 beds in 505,000 square feet, with phased opening from summer 2026 ¹⁴. Near the Medical District, a study can treat that campus as a documented anchor; rumored projects stay unconfirmed until they carry a permit.

The spending base is wide as well as deep: median household income of $90,275 in the same five-year survey ⁶¹, and per capita personal income of $77,801 in 2024 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis ⁶².

Growth in Dallas-Fort Worth follows its radial highways and tollways: US 75 and the Dallas North Tollway north into Collin County, I-35W and SH 114 toward Alliance, I-20 east into Kaufman County and west into Parker and Hood counties, and I-45 and US 287 south into Ellis County. The industrial absorption leaders named above are the best available guide to where freight concentrates.

The research ties no traffic count to any of these corridors. What it does turn up is the kind of evidence a lender should discount: broker flyers for I-20 sites near Terrell and Hudson Oaks that quote counts with no station attached, or that cite TxDOT without naming one. The method on our Texas page replaces them. On I-20, I-35W and I-45 the truck share decides a travel center's diesel and parking revenue, so the classification count matters as much as the total.

A travel center or truck parking project on those corridors should also count competing spaces within a defined drive time, including the new grant-funded spaces in Fort Worth, before it assumes overnight demand. Our truck stop and travel center page sets out that census.

On the fuel side, County Business Patterns counted 3,423 gas station and convenience store establishments across the metro in 2023 ⁶³. A study that calls a stretch underserved should say how many of them sit inside its drive time.

Four of our worked cases sit in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, three of them on the I-20 corridor where the metro meets its exurbs. In Terrell, Kaufman County, the truck stop case sizes a diesel and truck-parking program at an I-20 exit east of Dallas under SBA 504, with only broker claims for traffic near the site. In Granbury, Hood County, the RV and boat storage case sets lake-driven storage demand against the crowded regional supply described above. In Weatherford, Parker County, the franchised dealership case underwrites a dealership's real estate and franchise relationship on the western growth edge. The multifamily case on the outer ring of a major Texas metro carries absorption, effective rent and the agency takeout coverage test, the three numbers that decide an apartment loan in a pipeline this deep.