Dallas Is a Big Part of the Increasingly Popular Live-Work-Play Trend

In a discussion with a Dallas-area developer who made decisions based on data, he brought up the fact that home design is being influenced by work-from-home arrangements.

“Your home is not only your place to decompress,” Tom Oliver, Oxland Advisors co-president, told CandysDirt.com in 2020. “It’s your office. It’s your fitness place. It’s your school. It’s everything.”

This upward trend is also showing in apartment life.

Apartments are accounting for renters who want to live, work, and have fun without leaving their mixed-use buildings. Residents can roll out of bed, stumble to the apartment building’s office space, work away, then, for funsies, find a business associated with the mixed-use development.

According to a RentCafé study, apartments in live-work-play buildings have grown from niche to trendy. They are rapidly rising in popularity, quadrupling in number compared to 10 years ago.

Chalk it up to another result of the pandemic. The race to build more of these vertical villages peaked during the pandemic, with 49,100 such apartments opening in 2020, as residents looked to have everything close at hand.

Guess who’s among the nation’s leaders in this hybrid work trend?

Dallas is the seventh-ranked city nationally in the number of apartments in mixed-use buildings. Dallas has 12,600 apartments that fit this model.

RentCafé also uncovered a bit of no-kidding Census-based data about Dallas. Millennials make up 40 percent of the renters who reside in live-work-play buildings.

Mixed-use developments are increasingly popular with younger generations who are highly conscientious of our environment. It seems that local developers are catching on to the trend as well.

In the past decade (2012-2021), Dallas built 8,800 new apartments in live-work-play developments, accounting for 18 percent of the city’s rentals built in this time trend. RentCafé found that another 3,000 apartments will add to that total in 2022 and beyond. Austin ranked 12th (7,800) and Houston 17th (6,200).

Texas has 44,400 live-work-play properties.

In Dallas, the ratio between living space and work-play areas is 87 percent to 13 percent. On a national level, the ratio is 70-30.

The play part of these buildings includes amenities such as fitness centers, clubhouses, spas, tennis courts, grocery stores, and restaurants.

In more no-kidding data, Manhattan leads the nation with most apartments in live-work-play buildings with 89,500, one-fifth of the nation’s total. Across the East River, Brooklyn is second with 26,100. Queens, N.Y., is eighth with 12,600.

What is RentCafé? It’s a nationwide apartment search website and a part of Yardi Matrix.

Report review: RentCafé and Yardi Matrix did their research for this report. The report is presented in five dynamic charts that put the study in perspective. It’s a four-bunny rabbit hole. 🐇 🐇 🐇 🐇