An aerial photograph of a city's downtown from a distance, showing a bridge over fields and roads leading into the metro area.

The Dallas metro area has seen the most activity in real estate development over the past decade, becoming like a magnet for new residents and businesses, according to new research from StorageCafe, a national storage-space marketplace from Yardi. Dallas led the U.S. in development, but the majority of major cities across the country saw an increase in real estate development over the last 10 years, the report shows.

Researchers looked at real estate development from 2012 to 2021 by factoring in construction in single-family, multifamily, self-storage, office, retail, and industrial sectors among the 50 largest metro areas.

“After experiencing limited growth in the first half of the past decade, as most markets were still navigating the effects of the Great Recession, the real estate market was firing on all cylinders in the second half,” the StorageCafe report says. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 sparked a brief pause in activity, but 2021 “saw a pickup in construction activity in most of the country’s largest metros,” the report says.

In the chart below, StorageCafe ranks the largest metros by new real estate construction from 2012 to 2021.

A table showing the metros leading development over the past 10 years.

 

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