The Chip-Making Real Estate Boom in North Texas

While the Federal Reserve is trying to slow down the economy and basically kill a few million jobs, some areas are just not cooperating. Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio have been gold mines for investors in recent years, and now that gold mine is moving north into the suburbs of North Texas. It’s not only attracting remote workers who want a lower cost of living, but the area is turning into the next big American technology hub that will create thousands of new jobs. That's why I started a single family rental fund that is buying properties near those jobs. If you want to find out more about our Texas Single Family Rental Fund, got to GrowDevelopments.com.

Hi, I'm Kathy Fettke and this is Real Estate News for Investors. If you like our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review.

As real estate investors, you know that population growth and job growth are essential for a good real estate market. Texas has both of those.

Texas Population Growth

Census Bureau data shows the Dallas-Fort Worth as the top population growth region in the U.S. Three other Texas metros were also on the top ten list. From July of 2020 to July of 2021, 97,000 new residents moved into Dallas-Fort Worth. Another 69,000 moved into Houston, 53,000 into Austin, and 35,000 into San Antonio. (1)

Texas Job Growth

The Lone Star state also grabbed the top spot for U.S. job growth. According to the Texas Economic Development Corp., Texas created a total of 736,700 new positions since July of last year. More than 400,000 of them were created since January of this year. TWC Chairman Bryan Daniel says it’s a record amount of new jobs for Texas within that short time frame. (2)

Growth in North Texas

But while some of the big metro growth is softening, there’s another Texas hot spot that is just taking off. It’s happening north of Dallas, along a 30-mile stretch of Highway 75 between the cities of McKinney and Sherman, and surrounding areas. The highway runs north from Dallas and is known as the new Silicon Alley or even Silicon Prairie by some people because it’s attracting big players in the chip-making industry.

The New Silicon Alley

Sherman appears to be ground zero for much of this big tech growth. Just a few months ago, in May, Texas Instruments broke ground on a $30-billion semiconductor manufacturing campus in the city of Sherman. The TI project will be a huge 4.7-million square-foot campus consisting of four chip-manufacturing factories and an estimated 3,000 new good-paying jobs. According to an article in Axios, TI hopes to be producing tens of thousands of 300mm wafer chips a day by 2025.

Governor Greg Abbott also announced several months ago that GlobiTech will expand its chip-making operations in Sherman with an additional state-of-the-art $5 billion dollar chip-making plant. The factory is expected to employ another 1,500 people and produce 2.4 million wafers a month when it’s up and running. GlobiTech is the subsidiary of Taiwan-based GlobalWafers.

A chip supplier for Apple’s iPhone is also operating a factory in Sherman. It opened in 2018 as Finisar but has since changed its name to Coherent.

The Mayor of Sherman says: “Sherman has spent years building a business-friendly climate and laying the groundwork to support large employers. Now for the second time in less than a year, that investment has paid huge dividends.” (3)

President of the Sherman Economic Development Corp. Kent Sharp says the two new chip-making projects are “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities for the region. He says: “You work your entire career in economic development with the hopes of being part of a deal that has a “B” in front of it – and we’ve landed two in the past year.” I think he’s referring to the multi-billion dollar price tags.

New Boomtown Darlings

But Sherman isn’t the only boomtown darling along the Highway 75 corridor. Some of the other cities getting the attention of new residents, developers, and investors include Denison, Gainesville, Plano, McKinney, and a sleepy town called Anna.

The Real Deal writes about Anna, saying that developers weren’t interested in Anna prior to the pandemic because it was considered too far north of Dallas. But things started changing when Covid hit the nation. Thanks to remote work, people began migrating into the Texas suburbs from the bigger metros and other parts of the country. For reference, Anna is about 45 miles north of Dallas.

Anna’s Mayor Nate Pike works in Sherman as a financial advisor, and is seeing first-hand how the area is changing. She says: “The amount of momentum that (local leaders are) going to put into the U.S. 75 corridor, all the way to the Oklahoma border, Anna is certainly going to feel a lot of positive impact from that.” (4)

The Real Deal says the city is expecting its population to more than double by 2030. That’s prompting the city to invest in things like road improvements and to simplify the permitting process for developers. New rules have reportedly shortened the permitting process from a few weeks to just a few days.

The Mayor says: “We have truly created a culture of wanting to be the most developer-friendly city in all of North Texas.” And homebuilders are responding with new development projects in various cities along the Highway 75 corridor. According to DMagazine, construction permits have more than doubled in Sherman since June of last year. They are up 15% in Anna and 2% in the city of Melissa, for example.

Anna’s Economic Development Director Joey Grisham says: “My phone has been ringing off the hook with interest. It’s definitely an exciting time for the Dallas-Fort Worth region as a whole.”

RealWealth has been helping members acquire rental properties in North Texas for over a decade now, and the growth has not slowed down. If you want to build your portfolio with the team we've been working with, just go to RealWealth.com and click on the invest tab. You'll see the drop down for Dallas, Texas, where you'll get more information on the area and contract details for the acquisitions team and property manager.

If you are looking for a more passive investment, and are accredited, which means you either earn $200k as an individual or $300k as a couple, or have a million dollar net worth, check out our Single Family Rental Fund at GrowDevelopments.com.

You’ll find links to articles with more info in the show notes at newsforinvestors.com. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review!

Thanks for listening! I’m Kathy Fettke.

Links:

1 -https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2022/06/06/north-texas-population-growth

2 -https://businessintexas.com/news/with-72800-new-jobs-in-july-texas-hits-monthly-employment-high-for-2022/

3 -https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-globitech-semiconductor-facility-expansion-in-sherman

4 -https://therealdeal.com/texas/2022/10/19/is-this-sleepy-village-the-next-north-texas-boomtown/

5 -https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-ceo/2022/september/north-texas-is-the-countrys-new-semiconductor-manufacturing-capital/