Alliance Keeps Building Big While the Rest of DFW Talks About Slowing Down

Hillwood broke ground this summer on Alliance Westport 16, a 1.2 million square foot speculative building in the Alliance Logistics District, with delivery targeted for the middle of 2027. That single project would be a headline anywhere else in the metro. In Alliance, it's the latest entry in a pipeline that now runs past 8 million square feet either under construction or in design across the corridor. Hillwood is also breaking ground on two more Class A spec buildings this month, a roughly 800,000 square foot facility off Intermodal Parkway and a smaller 310,000 square foot project nearby. Nobody else in DFW is building at this scale in one submarket right now.

That's worth sitting with for a second, because a lot of the conversation around DFW industrial this year has centered on tightening vacancy and a construction pipeline that's finally starting to moderate. Alliance is running the opposite playbook. Developers there keep adding speculative product even as land gets scarcer and harder to find in tighter-in submarkets like Great Southwest or Stemmons. The reason comes down to what Alliance has that a lot of the rest of the metro doesn't: enormous contiguous land holdings, direct access to Fort Worth Alliance Airport and a BNSF intermodal facility, and a master developer in Hillwood that's been assembling and entitling this ground for over three decades. When a 3PL or manufacturer needs a million-square-foot building on a specific timeline, Alliance is one of the few places in DFW that can actually deliver a site big enough and ready enough to make that happen.

The tenant mix reflects that scale. Big logistics and 3PL operators keep signing large blocks here, alongside advanced manufacturers drawn to the rail access and the labor pool along the I-35W corridor. Amazon and other major distribution users have long-standing footprints in the area, and that gravitational pull keeps bringing their suppliers and service providers into the corridor too. More recently, data center and power-hungry users have started competing for some of the same large sites, which has added a new layer of demand that didn't really exist in Alliance five years ago. That competition for power capacity is something worth watching, because it changes how developers think about which sites get built next and how quickly.

Investment activity backs up the growth story. BGO and Alliance Industrial Co. recently picked up a 266,000 square foot distribution building in the Northeast Tarrant portion of the corridor, a property built in 2020 with 32-foot clear heights and more than 50 dock doors, the kind of specs institutional buyers want in their portfolios right now. Deals like that tell you the corridor isn't just attracting developers chasing land. It's attracting capital that wants to own finished, leased product here for the long haul.

None of this means Alliance is an easy market for tenants right now. With this much square footage moving through construction, absorption has to keep pace or landlords risk sitting on shadow vacancy, and so far demand has largely kept up. Large-block users, anyone looking at 300,000 square feet and up, generally still have real options in Alliance because that's exactly the size range developers are building for. Where it gets tighter is in the 50,000 to 150,000 square foot range. Smaller spec buildings get absorbed quickly once they deliver, and there's less of that size product actively in the pipeline compared to the big boxes getting all the attention.

If you're touring space in Alliance, a few things matter more here than in older, more infill submarkets. Clear height in new construction typically runs 32 to 40 feet, well above what you'll find in older buildings closer to Dallas or Fort Worth's urban core, so if your operation doesn't need that vertical space, you may be paying for cubic footage you'll never use. Dock door ratios and trailer parking counts also tend to run generous in the newest spec product, built for cross-dock distribution rather than light manufacturing, so if your use case is different, look closely at whether the building actually fits or whether you're better served by an older, more moderately specced building elsewhere in the corridor.

Power is the other variable worth asking about early, especially if you run any kind of automation, cold storage, or heavy equipment. With data center and advanced manufacturing users now competing for capacity in parts of the corridor, some sites that used to have ample power available are seeing that capacity committed faster than it used to. It's a smart question to raise with a landlord or developer before you get too far into lease negotiations, not after.

Rate and concessions in Alliance still skew more competitive than the DFW average, mostly because there's simply more supply here relative to other submarkets. That won't last forever if absorption keeps running at its current pace, but for now tenants touring the corridor still have leverage that's harder to find in tighter-in areas like Great Southwest or the Inland Port. If a large-format distribution building is on your list for a relocation or expansion in the next year, Alliance deserves a serious look, both for the inventory currently available and for what's coming online over the next several quarters.

The corridor isn't for every operation. If proximity to Dallas proper matters more to your labor pool or your customer base than raw building specs, you'll want to weigh that against what Alliance offers. But for tenants who need scale, modern building specs, and a developer with the land and track record to deliver on a real timeline, North Fort Worth remains one of the few places in DFW still building like the growth story hasn't slowed down at all.