Texas Real Estate Business • September 2025

www.REBusinessOnline.com September 2025 • Volume 21, Issue 7 DFW MULTIFAMILY INVESTMENT SALES MARKET TURNS THE CORNER allas-Fort Worth (DFW) is a mul-tifamily powerhouse, and after nearly three years of elevated in-terest rates, massive volumes of new de-liveries and stagnated trading activity, the metroplex’s investment sales market may soon be showcasing that alpha sta-tus once again. Of course, that sentiment was preva-lent at the very beginning of the year Excess supply is still burning off in select submarkets, and the latest interest rate cut is not an overnight ﬁ x, but brokers still have reason for cautious optimism. D By Taylor Williams too. Optimism for lower interest rates and pro-growth policies understand-ably accompanied the arrival of the sec-ond Trump administration. Local fac-tors, such as the peaking of the wave of new supply and the ever-steady ﬂ ow of jobs and people into the metroplex, aug-mented that sentiment such that many multifamily lenders and investors en-tered 2025 with considerably more ebul-lience following a couple of rough years in 2023 and 2024. “Coming out of the gates, things felt pretty good, but a lot of this year’s volatility was based on [interest] rate movement, which was primarily based on geopolitical issues,” says Drew Kile, executive managing director of invest-ments at Institutional Property Advisors (IPA), a division of Marcus & Millichap. “Had rates come down methodically more like the last two months, there would have been less of an impact. It’s hard for buyers to make decisions when rates are whipsawing like what we saw the past couple years, when we were at 4 [percent] one quarter and ﬂ irting with 4.75 [percent] the next.” “Coming out of the NMHC (Na-tional Multifamily Housing Council) SEE DFW page 20 LENDERS’ SENTIMENTS ON HOUSTON INDUSTRIAL MARKET IN 2025 REFLECT PENDULUM-LIKE MOVEMENT By Taylor Williams An InterFace panel breaks down the variables that have driven the back-and-forth views on the sector this year. I n the span of eight months — a blip in the life cycles of most commercial real estate deals and projects — lend-ers in the Houston industrial space have gone from enthusiastic to tepid to back to borderline optimistic. This pendulum-like pattern that has reﬂ ected the vacillating appetites of capital providers to deploy funds is not unique to the Houston industrial mar-ket. At the start of the year, commercial lenders across a range of asset classes and markets expressed positive expecta-tions for 2025. A new, pro-business pres-idential administration, the building on short-term interest rate cuts in late 2024, a widespread sense that it was simply time to get back into the game — all of these notions played into an ebullient outlook for commercial deal volume in the new year. It would not last very long. Uncon-ventional, sweeping policies imple-mented by the second Trump adminis-tration, including mass layoffs of federal employees and implementation of tar-iffs on major American trading partners, deeply rattled investors and capital providers. Even as the administration backtracked in some cases to calm mar-kets, the lack of certainty on key policy decisions left many business owners in a state of limbo, unsure of how best to handle major operational decisions, in-cluding those involving real estate. Today, the pendulum appears to be swinging back toward the positive per-spective, but perhaps at a slower pace Finance and investment professionals who spoke at the InterFace Houston Industrial conference included, from left to right: Warren Hitchcock of Northmarq; Josh Huse of BridgeCo Financial; Jonathan Paine of Walker & Dunlop; and Rob Banzhaf of Newcor Commercial Real Estate. SEE INDUSTRIAL page 22 INSIDE THIS ISSUE Texas Real Estate Business ’ Annual Economic Development Spotlight page 18 Preliminary Sponsors, Agenda for Entertainment Experience Evolution page 19