DSV Global Transport and Logistics has leased a warehouse of about 1.1 million square feet at 1110 North Western Boulevard in Denton, Texas, from EQT Exeter, according to The Real Deal. A source familiar with the deal said the lease was signed in July and that DSV expects to move in around November. It is DSV’s second lease of more than 1 million square feet in North Texas this year, after 3400 Catherine Court in Northlake in March, per the deals platform Traded. A DSV spokesperson confirmed the company is present in the area but declined to comment on the project, and EQT Exeter’s Colby Schraegle did not respond to The Real Deal. CBRE’s Ward Richmond, who executed the deal while at Colliers, represented DSV. Rent, lease term and any concessions have not been disclosed.
Where the $1.2 billion comes from
The headline number did not come from DSV, EQT or a lender. It comes from a project record filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which lists the owner as EQT Denton Land LP and, according to Hoodline’s account of the record, an estimated cost of $1,235,238,700 for work scheduled to run from September 28, 2026 to March 12, 2027. The scope The Real Deal describes is an interior office remodel and warehouse restroom expansions and additions. The Real Deal itself noted the filing is preliminary and subject to change.
It helps to know what this kind of filing is. The Texas Architectural Barriers program requires projects with an estimated cost of $50,000 or more to be registered with the state so the design can be reviewed for accessibility compliance by a Registered Accessibility Specialist. It is a compliance registration, not a building permit valuation, a construction contract or a loan. The department warns that providing “false or misleading information” during registration is a violation, but nothing suggests the state audits the cost field against a contractor’s bid. Some coverage says the filing and The Real Deal’s report are two sources arriving at roughly the same number, but both trace to the same record, so that is not independent confirmation.
Why the number doesn’t compute
Divide $1.235 billion by 1.1 million square feet and the implied cost is about $1,120 a square foot, for a scope that consists of offices and restrooms. Contractor-published cost guides for Dallas-Fort Worth, which are marketing benchmarks rather than audited data, generally put new warehouse construction somewhere between roughly $95 and $230 a square foot. At the top of that range, building a brand-new 1.1-million-square-foot warehouse would cost about $253 million, so the reported renovation would run nearly five times the cost of starting from scratch.
A comparable record points somewhere else. In 2023, a tenant fit-out at an Exeter-owned building on the same street, 1011 North Western Boulevard, was registered with the same program for a tenant finish-out of warehouse restrooms, an IT room, a janitor closet and other areas across 608,000 square feet, at an estimated cost of $1.2 million. Divide the DSV figure by 1,000 and it becomes about $1.24 million, squarely in line with that earlier record. That is a coincidence of scale worth noting, not proof: neither the state, EQT Exeter nor DSV has said the DSV entry contains an error, and the record could still be revised. The reasonable reading for now is that the $1.2 billion should not be treated as a construction budget. A city building permit valuation, if one is filed, would be a firmer indicator of what the work actually costs.
The market behind the lease
Whatever the fit-out costs, the lease itself fits the market it landed in. JLL counted 16.9 million square feet of industrial leasing in Dallas-Fort Worth in the second quarter, bringing the first half to 34.6 million, with net absorption of 17.9 million square feet, the most of any U.S. industrial market. Vacancy fell to 9.3%, the seventh straight quarterly decline from an 11.1% peak in the third quarter of 2024. Cushman & Wakefield’s tally is higher, a record 40.3 million square feet of first-half leasing, with vacancy just above 8% and average asking rents of $9.19 a square foot, up more than 13% in a year. CoStar counted nearly 42 million square feet across 1,600 deals. The trackers use different methodologies, which is why the totals vary, but all point the same direction…