Garland's Industrial Market Doesn't Get the Headlines, and That's Exactly Why Tenants Like It

Ask most people outside commercial real estate to name a DFW industrial submarket and you'll hear Alliance, maybe DFW Airport, maybe the Great Southwest. Almost nobody says Garland. That's a little strange, because Garland and the broader northeast Dallas industrial corridor have quietly been some of the steadiest leasing markets in the metro for years, even while the spotlight sits elsewhere.

Part of the reason Garland gets overlooked is geography. It sits east of Dallas proper, tucked along the President George Bush Turnpike and I-635, in a part of the metro that doesn't photograph as well for a glossy market report as a 500-acre master-planned park in Alliance does. There's no single mega-developer narrative here - instead, a patchwork of industrial parks built up over decades, filled in piece by piece as the city grew east from Dallas toward Rockwall and Mesquite. That patchwork is actually the point. Garland's building stock skews older than the newer big-box corridors, plenty of shallow-bay and mid-size buildings from the 1970s through 90s, mixed with newer construction filling in where land has opened up. The city has deep manufacturing roots going back to Texas Instruments and the defense and electronics suppliers that grew up around it, and a lot of that legacy real estate has simply been repositioned for today's tenants - machine shops, light assembly operations, and regional distribution users occupying buildings built for a very different manufacturing economy.

The tenant mix tells the real story. This isn't a corridor built around a handful of trophy big-box users - it's a working submarket, full of smaller and mid-size tenants who need 20,000 to 150,000 square feet, functional clear heights, and a location close to Dallas rather than 300,000 square feet of cross-dock space thirty minutes outside the core. Andersen Windows renewed its lease at a Garland distribution center this year rather than relocate, a decent signal about how occupiers here think about staying put once a building works - moving costs money and disrupts a workforce that's commuted to the same spot for years, and in Garland that math usually favors renewal. There's new supply coming too, just not at the scale you'd see further north or south: Lovett Industrial and PCCP broke ground on a 14-acre, 241,000-square-foot business park, a sign developers see enough demand to justify new shallow-bay and mid-bay product even while the headlines focus on megadeals elsewhere.

Location is Garland's real advantage, and it's easy to undersell. The corridor sits close to central Dallas with quick access to I-635, the George Bush Turnpike, and US-75 - huge for any tenant running last-mile delivery routes or serving customers across the northern half of the metro. A driver based out of Garland can reach most of Dallas proper, Richardson, and the northern suburbs faster than from almost anywhere else in the region. Labor is the other piece landlords and tenants both point to: Garland and the surrounding suburbs have a deep, established workforce used to manufacturing and distribution work, built up over the decades Texas Instruments anchored the local economy. Employers here aren't starting from scratch building a labor pool the way some newer fringe corridors are, though that institutional familiarity also means more competition for experienced workers from neighboring employers.

Rents in Garland tend to run below the newer, trophy big-box submarkets, which makes sense given the age of the stock and smaller average building size - and that gap matters more than ever with the rest of the metro tightening. Matthews put Q3 2026 DFW-wide vacancy at 7.8%, down roughly 115 basis points from a year earlier, with average asking rent at a record $10.36 a square foot and still around 34 million square feet under construction metro-wide, according to figures cited by TenantBase and CBRE. Almost none of that new construction is landing in Garland, which keeps its older inventory relevant and keeps landlords here from feeling the pressure new-building owners do. Use that leverage while it exists: ask for free rent, a fair TI allowance, and a lease term that doesn't lock you in for ten years on a building whose roof needs attention.

The tradeoff is real. You generally won't find a 36-foot-clear, ESFR-sprinklered, cross-dock facility in Garland the way you might in a corridor built from scratch for e-commerce fulfillment. Ceiling heights and column spacing vary a lot building to building, and a tenant with specific racking or automation requirements needs to walk buildings carefully rather than assume a given square footage translates into usable space. For tenants who fit the profile, though - close to Dallas, values an established workforce, doesn't need the newest specs on the market - Garland delivers functional space at a fair price with less competition for the building than you'd face in the hotter submarkets everyone else is already watching. Sometimes the best deal in DFW industrial is the one that isn't getting written about.