DFW CRE Insider — Issue 7

 $3.05 Billion

The combined data center financing closed in North Texas in the past two weeks. CyrusOne refinanced $1.05 billion in Allen. DataBank secured $2 billion in Ellis County. Oracle is moving in. The capital doesn't lie — North Texas is the data center capital of the country right now.

 IN THIS ISSUE

1. Deal: CyrusOne's $1.05B Allen Refinancing — Five of the biggest banks in America just underwrote a single data center campus. Here's what that means.

2. Deal: DataBank's $2B Ellis County Bet — Oracle is moving into Red Oak. And they're already planning a fourth building.

3. Analysis: Can Anyone Save Downtown Dallas? — 30% vacancy, zombie towers, and a once-in-a-generation window to get it right. A deep dive from D Magazine.

4. Data: Dallas Commercial Property Up 15.7% — While national values fell 7%, Dallas went the other direction. Apartments, warehouses, hotels — all surging.

5. Sponsor: CRE Castle — The platform built for DFW deal-makers.

DEAL: CyrusOne's $1.05 Billion — Five Banks, One Campus, One Signal

Here is what the data center market in North Texas looks like right now: CyrusOne just arranged a $1.05 billion fixed-rate mortgage loan on a single campus in Allen, Texas. The five-year loan is being funded by Citi Real Estate Funding, Barclays Capital Real Estate, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. KeyBank is the servicer. The deal is expected to close May 20.

Let that list sink in. Five of the most influential real estate lenders in the world putting over a billion dollars behind one 472,099-square-foot campus in a Dallas suburb.

The numbers underneath are equally striking. The Allen campus — DFW3 and DFW4, completed between 2017 and 2025 — carries 76.5 megawatts of power capacity. That's roughly equivalent to the electricity needs of 75,000 homes. The loan represents 66.8% of the property's appraised value of $1.57 billion, per a Newmark appraisal. The deal refinances $1.02 billion of existing debt and covers $27.6 million in transaction costs.

For context: KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners acquired CyrusOne for $15 billion in 2022 — at the time the largest take-private data center acquisition in history. This refinancing is essentially those firms repositioning a core asset into a longer-term capital structure. They're not selling. They're digging in.

The broader signal matters as much as the transaction. When Citi, Goldman, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo all commit to a single North Texas data center at over a billion dollars, it isn't a bet on one building. It's a bet on the market. Power availability, fiber infrastructure, geographic centrality, and the ongoing explosion of AI compute demand have made DFW one of the top two or three data center markets in the world.

KDC, meanwhile, added Robert Child as executive vice president of data center development. The Dallas-based developer is expanding its platform to chase the demand directly. The talent is moving where the capital is pointing.

DEAL: DataBank Bets $2 Billion on Ellis County — Oracle Moves In

While CyrusOne was refinancing in Allen, DataBank was closing a $2 billion construction loan for a data center campus in Ellis County — a stretch of land south of Dallas that most commercial brokers would not have mentioned in a conversation five years ago.

The campus — called DFW 9, DFW 10, and DFW 11 — totals 600,000 square feet and draws 180 megawatts of power. Oracle is the tenant. MUFG Bank is leading efforts to raise an additional $600 million to fund a fourth building.

DataBank didn't stop there. On April 20, the company filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for DFW 12 — a two-story facility with $155 million in estimated interior build-out costs. The scope includes data rack containment, tenant storage, and office fit-out.

Separately, Edged Energy — a Connecticut-based operator — filed with TDLR for a new 260,000-square-foot, two-story data center at 501 N. Wildwood Drive in Irving. Construction is expected to begin in July with completion targeted for late March 2028.

The CRE takeaway: Ellis County is not an accident. Land is available, power is accessible, and the proximity to Dallas-area fiber infrastructure works. The suburban and exurban data center play is real — and it is happening now in places that have never had institutional capital interest before. Brokers and landowners in Ellis, Johnson, and Kaufman counties should be paying close attention.

ANALYSIS: Can Anyone Save Downtown Dallas?

D Magazine published a definitive piece this week on the state of Dallas's central business district. It is worth your full attention.

The headline numbers are brutal. Eighteen of downtown's largest buildings hold 8 million square feet of empty space. The overall vacancy rate is approaching 30% — among the highest of any major U.S. city center. "Most of those buildings are owned by lenders," says developer and investor Ray Washburne. "They're basically zombie buildings."

But the piece isn't a eulogy. It's a diagnosis — and the treatment plan is already being assembled.

What went wrong: Downtown was built for a corporate headquarters model that no longer exists. Large floorplates, deep interiors, infrastructure designed for the 1980s. The buildings that made the skyline also made it nearly impossible to convert. "A typical conversion might cost around $350,000 per key," says developer Mike Ablon. "If you layer that on top of the existing building basis, you can easily end up needing $4 rents per square foot to make the numbers work."

The Goldman Sachs story is the clearest illustration. The firm wanted to stay downtown. Its broker Jeff Ellerman of Stream Realty scoured the CBD. There was no site that could support 5,000 employees in an urban campus format. Goldman went to Uptown — Hunt Realty's site near American Airlines Center, where a $700 million campus is now under construction with Hillwood. Downtown didn't lose Goldman to the suburbs. It lost it to Uptown because Uptown could offer what downtown couldn't.

What's actually moving: Three projects could change the trajectory — if they execute.

City Hall / Mavericks Arena: The 20-acre City Hall site is one of two finalists for a new arena and entertainment district. Owner Patrick Dumont has the vision. The city has until summer to decide. "This is the biggest piece of shit building," says Ellerman of I.M. Pei's brutalist landmark. Even preservationists are equivocal. "Keeping City Hall as it is would be generational theft," says Downtown Dallas Inc.'s Jennifer Scripps.

The $3.5 Billion Convention Center: The city's bet on reshaping the southern edge of downtown. Leaders project the new center could push hotel room nights from 350,000 to 850,000 annually — requiring 4,000 to 5,000 new hotel rooms and 30+ new restaurants to support the demand. But "when you don't see any substantial movement, it's hard to buy into the plan," says DRG Concepts CEO Nafees Alam. The Dallas Wings were promised a renovated arena for 2026. They're now waiting until 2027.

Dallas College: The most immediate and arguably most impactful driver. The college is eyeing 700,000 square feet in the urban core — bringing roughly 30,000 students downtown each year. It is already fully funded. "It becomes part of the city," says Ablon, comparing it to NYU's impact on Greenwich Village.

The street-level thesis: Stream's Ellerman frames it plainly: "The future is alternative uses — residential, the convention center, Dallas College, the potential Mavericks project at the City Hall site. But it's not office. The office model we've known is gone."

The leaders who show up in this article — Scripps, Perot Jr., Ablon, Washburne, Ellerman, Billingsley, McMahon, Clark — are not pessimists. But they're clear-eyed. "We are our own worst enemy," says Dallas Economic Development Corp. CEO Linda McMahon. "The city has to make it easier for the private sector to do their jobs."

If the convention center, the arena district, and Dallas College all come together, Ablon estimates 15 cranes downtown at once. That would be the most construction activity in 40 years.

The window is open. Whether Dallas can align and execute through it is the defining CRE question in the market right now.

DATA: Dallas Commercial Property Up 15.7% — While the Nation Fell 7%

The Dallas Central Appraisal District released its 2026 assessments, and the numbers tell a story that runs directly counter to the national narrative on commercial real estate.

Dallas County commercial property surged 15.7% in assessed value to $159.51 billion. Nationally, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis reports that commercial property values have fallen roughly 7% over the past several years — driven largely by office vacancy. In Dallas, office values actually increased 9.9%.

The breakdown by asset class:

Hotels lead the surge at +22.7%. Apartments follow at +19.6%. New multifamily construction is up 51.3%. Warehouses added 18%. Even retail jumped 13% — with strip centers up 16.8% and shopping centers up 17.4%. The only category losing ground: malls, down 11.9%.

On the residential side, values rose 4% overall to $299.63 billion. The highest-value homes ($1.5M+) appreciated fastest at +8.7%. Raw land jumped 11.8%.

One important caveat: DCAD estimated that 48% of Dallas homes are overvalued relative to actual sales prices at the start of 2026. The appraisal district uses lagged data — which creates a persistent gap between assessed value and market reality. That gap is the core argument for annual property tax protests. O'Connor Tax Reduction Experts reports that protests reduced taxes by $1.15 billion across Dallas County in 2024 alone. If you own commercial property in Dallas County and you're not protesting annually, you're leaving money on the table.

SPONSOR: CRE Castle — Built for DFW Deal-Makers

If you're underwriting deals, marketing properties, or advising clients in North Texas, CRE Castle is worth a look.

The platform gives sellers and owners an AI-driven way to analyze asset performance, run future projections based on custom parameters, and market directly to a network of DFW brokers. Buyers receive direct emails from sellers with detailed property information — plus a built-in stress-testing tool for underwriting assumptions in real time. Brokers can ingest property data, generate reports, and build custom offering memorandums from one place.

It's a deal platform built around the realities of how North Texas CRE actually works.

Explore CRE Castle at crecastle.com (https://www.crecastle.com/)

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."

— Mark Twain

(Tell that to the City Hall redevelopment committee.)

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