Amazon.com’s formal announcement of two big warehouse developments in North Texas will add to the industrial building boom underway in the area.
The distribution center deals have been in the works for months and will be constructed in Coppell near Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and north of Fort Worth near Alliance Airport in the town of Haslet.
Both projects for the Seattle-based on-line retailer will be built by Dallas-based developer Hillwood, the real estate investment and building firm headed by Ross Perot Jr.
Just a few weeks ago Perot was talking about the deals he’s doing for the Internet retailer at a morning breakfast meeting.
“We are now doing 3 million square feet for Amazon,” Perot said at the Weitzman Group’s annual retail real estate meeting. “Internet fulfillment is a huge driver for our business.”
The Amazon warehouse being built near Alliance Airport will be just over 1 million square feet. And the Coppell building will be another million.
Hillwood just opened another million-square-foot Amazon warehouse in its Alliance California business park in San Bernardino.
The Haslet and Coppell projects will add to the surging Dallas-Fort Worth industrial building market.
But those warehouse deals for Amazon also are an indication of how much the retail scene has changed.
A couple of decades ago, the merchandise that’s in those 2 million square feet of Amazon warehouses would have been on store shelves in shopping centers in the region.
Now big box retailers including Best Buy and Office Depot are scaling back the size of their storefronts and the goods they would have sold are now sitting in warehouses for on-line retailing.
News Article | 1/31/2013