Dallas: the brand moved out and the money stayed

Here is a number the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published in July that most people in New York would not believe. The share of total employment in financial activities is higher in Dallas, at 10.1 percent, than in New York City, at 9.9 percent. Higher than Boston at 9.6, Chicago at 6.9, San Francisco at 6.5. The sector employed 317,000 people in the Dallas metro division in June, more than any other Texas metro, and the wider Dallas Fort Worth region counts about 380,000, second in the country behind New York and ahead of Chicago.

That is the county's real business. Everything the country associates with the word Dallas, the football, the oil money, the television show, is somewhere else or long gone. What is actually inside the county line is a finance and corporate headquarters economy that has been building for a decade and is about to get several thousand more desks.

Where Dallas actually is

Start with a fact that surprises people who do not live here. The Dallas Cowboys have not played a home game in Dallas County since 1970. They moved to Irving in 1971, which is still in the county, and then to Arlington in 2009, which is not. The Texas Rangers have been in Arlington since 1972. FC Dallas plays in Frisco, in Collin County, where the Cowboys also keep their headquarters. And in June the Dallas Stars announced they will leave downtown for Plano when their lease ends in 2031.

Toyota's North American headquarters is in Plano. Charles Schwab and Fidelity are in Westlake, in Denton and Tarrant counties. American Airlines is in Fort Worth. Keurig Dr Pepper is in Frisco. When the national press writes about companies moving to Dallas, roughly half the time the company is moving to a suburb in a different county.

None of this is a complaint. It is the shape of the place. The brand sprawls across four counties and the money concentrates in one. For anyone underwriting Dallas County specifically, that distinction is the whole job.

The listed companies

Dallas County has one of the deepest public company bases of any county in the country, and most of it sits in two places: the central city, and Irving.

Irving first, because it is underrated. The Las Colinas corridor near the airport holds McKesson, which moved from San Francisco in 2019 and sits near the top of the Fortune 500 by revenue. Caterpillar, which moved from Illinois in 2022. Kimberly Clark. Fluor. Vistra, the largest competitive power generator in the country. Celanese. Commercial Metals. Builders FirstSource. That is eight large public companies in one suburb, and several of them arrived in the last seven years.

In the city itself: AT&T, headquartered downtown since 2008. Texas Instruments, founded here and still here. Southwest Airlines at Love Field. CBRE, the largest commercial real estate services firm in the world, which moved from Los Angeles in 2020. Energy Transfer. Tenet Healthcare. Jacobs. Comerica, which left Detroit in 2007. Match Group. HF Sinclair. Atmos Energy. Copart. Trinity Industries. Texas Capital Bancshares. Texas Pacific Land, which owns about 900,000 acres of the Permian and has become one of the strangest large cap stocks in America.

The Dallas Fed counts 125 corporate headquarters relocations to the Dallas area between 2015 and 2024, more than any other Texas metro. Just under half came from California. CBRE has ranked Dallas Fort Worth the top metro in the country for headquarters relocations seven years running, and the firm's own reasoning for why has shifted: labor availability is now the primary driver, ahead of cost. Companies are coming for the workforce, not just the tax bill.

Y'all Street

The phrase is a joke that stopped being one. The Texas Stock Exchange opened for trading on July 6 from a temporary headquarters in Dallas, the first fully integrated national exchange to launch in more than two decades, on $275 million in backing from Citadel Securities, BlackRock, Schwab, and Goldman. Trading rolled out symbol by symbol through July. Exchange traded products list this month and the first corporate listings are expected in October, with IPOs planned for 2027. The New York Stock Exchange responded by opening NYSE Texas and signing a lease in Uptown. Nasdaq opened a Texas office as well.

The exchange is the headline, but the campuses are the substance. Goldman Sachs is building an 815,000 square foot regional headquarters at NorthEnd, an eleven acre district north of downtown, for about 5,000 employees, at a cost of roughly $500 million. Delivery is targeted for early 2028 and it will be the firm's second largest office in the world. Bank of America broke ground on a thirty story tower at Parkside, less than a mile away, due in early 2027. Wells Fargo built a $570 million, 850,000 square foot campus in Las Colinas for about 3,000 workers. And in late August, Morgan Stanley picked Uptown for a hub that commits to 1,500 jobs between 2027 and 2031, with a path to 4,800 by 2035.

One detail in the Fed's July report is worth holding onto. Financial activities employment in Dallas actually dipped slightly in the three months through June, the only sector that declined. That is not a contradiction. The campuses are under construction, not occupied. The jobs the banks have announced show up in 2027 and 2028, and the number to watch is whether the sector's headcount steps up when the buildings open, not whether it grows in the meantime.

Real estate

Residential is quieter than Austin and Houston, in a way that matters.

The Dallas Fort Worth median sale price was $404,900 in July, down 1.7 percent from a year earlier and about 2 percent below the peak of $414,990 in May 2024. The University of Texas at Arlington's real estate center puts the 2025 decline across the region at about 5 percent. Inside the city of Dallas the median is closer to $489,000, and the Park Cities, the two enclaves around SMU that make up Highland Park ISD, run to a median around $2.3 million.

Here is the distinction from the other two big metros. Dallas Fort Worth inventory in July was 37,231 homes, down 4.7 percent from a year earlier, while national inventory rose 4.4 percent. Months of supply fell to 5.0. Homes sat a median 62 days. Existing home sales were up 7.3 percent year over year in April. Prices are soft, but the supply side is tightening rather than loosening, which is the opposite of what Houston and Austin are doing. Houston has 130 percent more sellers than buyers. Dallas does not.

Office is where the county has done its penance and is starting to come out. Colliers put Dallas Fort Worth vacancy at 19.9 percent in the second quarter, below 20 percent for the first time since mid 2023, on 1.4 million square feet of positive absorption. Kidder Mathews, using CoStar's broader definition that includes sublease space, has total vacancy at 25.1 percent, down 90 basis points on the year. Office investment sales through June were up 54 percent from the same period last year.

The number underneath those is Preston Center. The submarket along Northwest Highway between the Park Cities and the Tollway posted direct vacancy of 5.3 percent and the highest asking rents in the region at $62 per square foot. That is a full market inside a metro that is still 20 percent empty, and it tells you where the money in this county actually wants to sit. Uptown is the other one: availability of 23.8 percent against a regional 27.5, Cousins Properties paying $281 million, or $747 per square foot, for The Link, a 94 percent leased tower. That is not distressed pricing. That is a buyer who thinks the Goldman campus is going to pull everything around it up.

The soft spots are real. Northeast Fort Worth office runs above 34 percent vacant. Townhomes in the metro are carrying 6.4 months of supply and their median price fell more than 5 percent in the spring. The regional office availability rate at 27.8 percent is still among the highest in the country. But the county's core, Uptown, Preston Center, the Park Cities, Las Colinas, is the part filling first, and the campuses under construction are all in it.

The sports teams, read as a county

This section is here because it is the cleanest illustration of the theme, not because arenas move capital.

The Mavericks and Stars have shared the American Airlines Center in Victory Park since 2001. Both leases end in July 2031. The two franchises have been in a legal dispute over the building's management agreement, and in the first week of June, one day apart, they announced they are leaving in opposite directions.

The Mavericks signed option agreements on about 104 acres at the former Valley View Mall site, at Interstate 635 and Preston Road, eleven miles north of downtown and still inside the city and the county. The plan is an arena with a mixed use district around it, construction taking about thirty months, opening for the 2031 season. Rick Welts, the executive who built the Warriors' Chase Center, was hired specifically to run this search, and the site more than doubles the minimum acreage he set. Mark Cuban's statement was two words long: in the city. The Adelson and Dumont families, who own the team and the Sands casino business, have been the subject of Las Vegas speculation since they bought it. This announcement is meant to end that.

The Stars are going to Plano, to the Willow Bend mall site, with a nonbinding letter of intent and a city that had already offered a billion dollar arena in February. That puts them in Collin County alongside FC Dallas and the Cowboys' headquarters. The Dallas Wings, meanwhile, moved the other direction, from Arlington into downtown Dallas.

So after 2031 the county keeps one of the five major franchises and gains a women's team. A dead mall on the tollway becomes the anchor of the northern half of the city. And the downtown arena that was built to keep both teams in the core loses both of them. Read as a county, the sports map is the corporate map: the name goes to the suburbs, the core keeps what it can hold, and what it holds gets rebuilt.

The schools

We left this out of the Austin piece and should not have. School districts are the single largest determinant of residential value in a Texas metro, and Dallas County has the strongest concentration in the state.

Start with the public school that outranks every private school in Texas. The School for the Talented and Gifted at Townview Center, a Dallas ISD magnet in Oak Cliff, is ranked eighth in the nation by U.S. News for 2026 and first in Texas, the only Texas school in the national top ten. Three more Dallas ISD magnets, the School of Science and Engineering, the Rangel Young Women's Leadership School, and the Sanders Law Magnet, sit in the national top fifty. Dallas ISD carries a B rating as a district and holds four of the ten best high schools in the state. Nobody outside Dallas knows this, and buyers who do have been quietly using it for years.

Then the Park Cities. Highland Park ISD serves about 7,100 students in two towns wrapped around SMU. Its high school is ranked 42nd in the country. Median home price is around $2.3 million, the district's tax rate is among the lowest in the region at about 83 cents per $100, and nearly every purchase inside the line is a jumbo loan. It is the most expensive residential real estate in Texas outside of Austin's Westlake, and it is the reason Preston Center office trades the way it does.

Coppell ISD, in the northwest corner of the county near the airport, puts two high schools in the national top hundred and is where relocating Las Colinas executives with children tend to land. Richardson ISD, straddling the county line with Lake Highlands on the Dallas side, is the value play: A rated campuses at $400,000 to $900,000. Texas REALTORS data for 2026 shows buyers paying $48 to $72 more per square foot for homes in A rated districts than comparable homes in lower rated ones, and in Dallas County that premium has a floor because the A rated districts are not building.

Above the districts: SMU in University Park, UT Southwestern Medical Center, which is one of the largest employers in the county and one of the top research institutions in the country, and UT Dallas on the Richardson line, which has grown from a commuter school into a serious engineering program in about fifteen years.

The job market

Dallas employment grew at a 3.7 percent annualized rate in June, ahead of the state's 3.5, with unemployment at 4.3 percent against Texas at 4.4. Three month growth was 1.8 percent and gains were broad, with the one exception noted above. Average hourly earnings in the region were $37.45 in April, above both the state and the national figure, and up 2.9 percent on the year.

The Dallas Fed's statewide forecast is the caution. It projected 278,000 new Texas jobs for 2026 in the spring, then said it expected the actual number to land near the low end of its range, around 1.1 percent, citing declining immigration constraining labor supply, productivity gains suppressing demand, and a moderation in its own business surveys. Dallas has outrun the state for most of the year, but the state's ceiling is lower than it was.

Professional and business services is the metro's largest sector and its fastest growing. Finance is the one the whole region is now built to expand. And the relocation pipeline, 125 companies in ten years and roughly 53 new offices opened in the metro in the ninety days before July, is running on labor availability rather than tax arbitrage, which is the healthier of the two reasons.

What would change the picture

Dallas County is the least dramatic of the three big metros and the most institutionally committed. Austin lost its migration story. Houston is buried in listings. Dallas has the highest concentration of finance employment in the country and several billion dollars of bank campuses under construction, and its residential inventory is tightening while everyone else's loosens.

That makes it the hardest of the three to buy well, because the story is already visible and priced in the submarkets where it is happening. Preston Center at 5 percent vacancy is not a discovery. Uptown at $747 a foot is not one either.

Before committing capital we would want:

• Financial activities employment in the Dallas metro stepping up when the Bank of America and Goldman buildings open in 2027 and 2028. The announced jobs are the thesis. The payroll numbers are the proof.
• Office vacancy holding below 20 percent through the delivery of both towers. New supply into a market that just crossed back under the line is the obvious risk.
• Residential inventory continuing to tighten, or at least not reversing. If Dallas Fort Worth listings turn up while Houston's are still building, the county's distinction from the rest of the state is gone.
• A corporate listing on the Texas Stock Exchange in October. Trading was the easy part. A company choosing to list here is what makes the exchange a Dallas institution rather than a Dallas office.

The sharper opportunity is probably not in the core at all. It is in the parts of the county the core is pulling on: the Valley View site and the Tollway corridor north of 635 once the Mavericks commit, the Lake Highlands side of Richardson ISD, the neighborhoods within a Dallas ISD magnet's draw. Those are the places where the county's institutions are the thesis and the price has not caught up to it. We will be looking there.