Last year was huge for industrial across DFW; the Metroplex led the country in construction with 20M SF (about 10% of all construction in the US). Local vacancy remained steady around 7% with absorption keeping up with new deliveries, and Hillwood SVP Tony Creme says we’ve now seen 21 consecutive quarters of positive net absorption. Those are just some of the factors that influenced Hillwood to plan 2M SF of spec space breaking ground in Q2. Pictured: Commonwealth Title's Jason McCoy and Trey Lentz, Tony and Paradigm Tax Group's Larry Backus.

The big story for 2015 was the Facebook land sale, Tony says. Why does Facebook need a $1B data center? Facebook has 1.5 billion users posting 45 billion messages, 2 billion photos and 8 billion videos every day. He says e-commerce is also having a huge effect on the market. There are more mobile devices than humans on the planet right now. Amazon is about to venture into the delivery business by controlling its own fleet delivering to UPS and FedEx, which is a first step to creating its own airline, Tony says. Alliance inked its 1M SF deal with Amazon in 2012. Since then, Walmart, UPS and FedEx have all located at Alliance, as well. When the e-commerce companies locate in one place, the shippers want to follow and vice versa.