Look At Us: We’re Leading the Nation in Real Estate Activity, and Here’s Why

For all of us who’ve maneuvered around traffic cones marking off construction areas in and around the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area, this makes perfect sense:

This region ranks first nationally in most activity in all sectors of real estate combined over the past decade. That’s the findings of a new report from STORAGECafé, an online platform that provides nationwide storage unit listings.

STORAGECafé crunched the numbers, analyzing new construction data from January 2012 to December 2021 in the country’s 50-most populated metro areas.

“One of the fastest-growing metros in the country, Dallas acted as a magnet for both new residents and businesses over the past decade, and the real estate market responded,” according to the report.

Houston is the most active single-family real estate market while the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area saw the highest number of building permits issued for new apartments.

Statistical highlights in the report include:

• Building permits have been issued for 323,250 single-family homes (a 59 percent increase) and 233,246 multi-family units (176 percent increase) in the past 10 years. The first pandemic year saw a 40 percent drop in multifamily construction. However, the development market bounced back in 2021 when almost 27,000 new apartments began construction in DFW.
• The trend of corporate locations led to office space swelling by 54,977,882 square feet, second only to New York City. Industrial space grew to 228,119,597 square feet and retail by 47,823,117.
• Self-storage added about a nation-leading 23 million square feet of new space in Dallas. The Dallas area is also one of the nation’s best markets for new self-storage supply.

“Self-storage generally follows growth in demand, which is what draws developers to a location,” Doug Ressler, Yardi Matrix’s business intelligence manager, said in the report. “The new supply pipeline nationally is now at 8.9% of existing stock. Growth has been concentrated in secondary markets across the South, Southwest, and West, especially in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Dallas, as well as the ‘Acela Corridor’ in the Northeast.”