'Return To An Office': DFW's RTO Push Is Fueling Coworking Boom

Despite Dallas-Fort Worth being a national leader in the return-to-office movement, Florida-based Venture X operators Kevin and Geidre Priddy jumped at the chance to acquire four coworking spaces in the metro. That’s because the region’s return-to-office push provides a major tailwind for DFW's coworking market, which ranks third in the nation.

The region’s office visitation numbers hit a post-pandemic high of nearly 87% in October, according to Avison Young's Office Busyness Index, which compares cellphone mobility data of daily employees to totals from June 2019. 

But many of those workers aren’t returning to the same buildings they visited before the pandemic. 

With the rise of remote work, several Fortune 500 companies reduced their major real estate footprints and have embraced a hybrid approach, according to Kevin Priddy. 

“It's not return to the office. It's return to an office,” Priddy said.

DFW added 13 new coworking spaces in the fourth quarter but fell from the No. 2 market in the nation to third, behind Chicago and Los Angeles, according to the latest coworking industry report compiled by CoworkingCafe, part of property management software company Yardi Systems. All those coworking spaces have helped North Texas’ overall return-to-office metrics reach levels on par with the national average, but the region’s busiest office markets and outer suburbs offer two very different recovery pictures. 

By using coworking locations as satellite offices, companies can have a smaller headquarters and scale up or down as needed, rather than paying for hundreds of thousands of square feet, Kevin Priddy said. To help provide those options, the husband-and-wife team's company, Priddy Spaces, picked up around 125K SF in Plano, Fort Worth and Dallas. 

Kevin Priddy called DFW a “high-growth, high-demand market” where they are eager to expand their footprint.

“We wouldn't have gone into a new market if we didn't have the growth plan to continue building that hub,” Kevin Priddy said. “We've laid out a 10-year growth strategy where we could foresee having 15 to 18 locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth market.”

At the top of their expansion wishlist are Frisco and other suburban markets where the return-to-office numbers haven’t been as strong but where there are high numbers of remote workers. 

The metro’s suburban markets trail the rest of the region with a less than 50% return to office, according to Avison Young. That is a sharp contrast to Dallas’ Central Business District and Uptown submarkets, which have fully recovered and reached nearly 106% of pre-pandemic office use numbers. 

“Within the DFW metroplex, we see a distinct tale of two markets,” Ariel Guerrero, Avison Young regional manager of market intelligence for the central region, said in an email to Bisnow. 

Urban core submarkets like Preston Center, LBJ Freeway and Central Expressway are also outperforming the regional average with a combined 82% recovery utilization rate, Guerrero said. The more suburban submarkets trail well behind those numbers because they lack the high-density walkability and amenity-rich environments that entice employees back to the office.

That widening amenity gap is the metro’s biggest headwind, according to Guerrero. Employees have shown a greater willingness to return to walkable environments like Uptown Dallas and Legacy West than the region’s older buildings that lack services and placemaking features.

Another friction point is the operational strain on peak attendance days. Bottlenecks in parking, network capacity and elevator flow sometimes create workplace experiences that workers don’t always find to be commuteworthy, Guerrero said. 

The region's flight-to-quality trend provided office momentum throughout 2025, and Guerrero said he expects that will continue this year, as DFW remains a national leader in office recovery. The urban core’s strong performance could also encourage companies to upgrade their buildings and boost recovery in suburban submarkets like Frisco and McKinney.

Those cities ranked at or near the top of a recent list of U.S. cities with the most remote workers compiled by financial information platform SmartAsset. Frisco topped the list for the second year in a row, while McKinney placed seventh.

Those high numbers of remote workers make those markets enticing to the Priddys, who tout productivity gains from fewer interruptions and distractions as selling points for their coworking locations. Plus, coworking offices can offer networking opportunities for professionals from a multitude of industries. 

“If you need marketing, you need a Realtor, you need a broker, you need even an engineer or architect — we’ve got them,” Geidre Priddy said.