Billingsley Adding Retail to International Business Park

Billingsley Company wants to expand the sprawling International Business Park in Carrollton by adding one of North Texas’ hottest asset classes.

The Dallas-based firm plans to add three retail buildings, totalling 27,000 square feet, to the 300-acre campus near the northwest corner of the Dallas North Tollway and Plano Parkway, the Dallas Morning News reported.

The project, at 3204 East Hebron Parkway, is expected to start this spring and open by the end of this year. O’Brien Architects is the designer.

The International Business Park, built in the 1990s, comprises 1.7 million square feet of office space across 13 buildings, 174,000 square feet of retail space and 940 apartments, according to Bilingsley’s website. The campus is home to more than 100 businesses and is one of the most successful suburban office complexes, the outlet said.

The project aligns with the growing demand for retail space in Dallas-Fort Worth. Through the first three quarters of 2023, investors poured more than $1.3 billion into DFW shopping centers.

Only 4.3 percent of retail space in the region was vacant at the end of the third quarter, and about 1.2 million square feet was leased, outweighing the 915,600 square feet of new supply. This scarcity of retail space drove up shopping center rents by an average of 8 percent year-over-year.

This trend bodes well for a sector that was pummeled by an increase of e-commerce during the initial years of the pandemic.

Billingsley, meanwhile, is at the helm of a 500-acre mixed-use development in Collin County, about 25 miles northeast of Dallas. The $3 billion project, dubbed Sloan Corners, is slated for more than 10 million square feet of office, 6,000 apartments and over 200,000 square feet of retail.

The firm is also behind the 1,000-acre Cypress Waters development in Dallas, which features 3.4 million square feet of office space, 282,000 square feet of retail space and thousands of apartments.

—Quinn Donoghue