The tiny Texas town often mispronounced as the queen of Tejano music, Selena, is already on the radar of a few savvy developers, but it's working toward broader awareness.

Though Celina is about 15 square miles now, it will be about 78 at build-out. Today, the city has less than 11,000 residents, but the city’s growth projections show 100,000 by 2024 and 340,000 at total build out.

It has a unique landscape of light farms and a historic downtown, similar to McKinney. Much of that farmland has already or will become residential lots. Celina will deliver 11,000 lots across several developments in 2017 and close to 17,000 lots in 2018 and 2019.

With that many rooftops in the pipeline, the CRE conversation naturally turns to retail, a conversation Celina EDC director Corbett Howard is poised to have with traffic counts as his arsenal. The three intersections where Preston Road meets Frontier Parkway, FM 88 and East Pecan Street see more than 53,000 cars per day combined. 

“We’re just starting to knock on the CRE door,” Howard told Bisnow. Where Preston Road meets the future Outer Loop highway is the most likely spot for the center of Celina’s commercial activity.

Celina Town Center already has a respectable list of tenants including McDonald’s, healthcare offices and Brookshire’s. Ground-up developments such as Rex Real Estate’s Glendenning Ranch — 600 acres of multifamily, office, retail and more — will be just the beginning of development in Celina. 

Plus, Howard and the city have some forthcoming announcements that they hope will make Celina more attractive to office and technology tenants.