DALLAS — When is the last time you really thought about warehouses? They’re kind of a big deal. Those hulking buildings make it possible for you to keep clicking "buy" for all those online items, and then magically getting them dropped at your door in two days, or one day, or the same day.
Those enormous industrial parks are also prime spots for companies that have decided to re-shore and bring some of their manufacturing back here.
Considering that the pandemic has made us more reliant than ever on e-commerce, and the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in global supply chains, it is no surprise that more of those huge industrial parks have been popping up in Dallas-Fort Worth to support manufacturing and e-commerce.
The New York Times was right on this month when it reported: Warehouse Space Is The Latest Thing Being Hoarded. According to Cushman & Wakefield, Texas-sized hoarding is happening.
Last year, Houston led the country with 23,753,775 more square feet of industrial building space added. D-FW wasn’t too far behind with 19,073,450 square feet added.
But this is the biggie: Another 54,123,127 square feet of warehouse and manufacturing space is being constructed in North Texas. That is, by far, more than anywhere else in the country.
And just to give you an idea, that 54 million square feet of work space being built is equivalent to eight Pentagons.
These are huge investments. Developers and companies see that we’re growing like wild in D-FW, and that they need a large industrial footprint to supply residents with what they need. And they like that the area is centrally located away from the big seaports.
Corporations took note of those huge shipping backups in December, and it started to make a lot more sense to start grabbing some huge warehouses in the middle of the country, stash a bunch of inventory in them, and then ship from those depots if incoming product gets caught in another bottleneck at the ports.