Toyota Financial Services will move hundreds of its staff into Dallas’s first mass timber office building in the spring or summer, with Toyota’s U.S. finance and other related products arm poised to occupy seven stories and 242,000 square feet (about 22,500 square metres) at the new Southstone Yards in North Texas, 30 miles (or 50 kilometres) from downtown Dallas.
Last year, Wood Central reported that the new development, built by local developer Crow Holdings, is the most significant lease-to-land deal in the Dallas-Fort Worth region in recent years. At the time, CoStar’s Director of Market Analytics, Bill Kitchens, said the deal signals a new dawn for timber buildings.
“When we began developing The Offices at Southstone Yards, our goal was to build a welcoming, collaborative, sustainable space for a forward-thinking tenant like Toyota Financial Services that wanted to create an elevated workplace for its team,” said Cody Armbrister, managing director for the Crow Holdings’ Development team, in an email to CoStar News last year. “We see Southstone Yards as emblematic of the future of what the office can be — specifically a place where people want to spend their day.”
“This is one of the largest office leases to be completed in Texas”, according to Steve Triolet, senior vice president of research and market forecasting for real estate services firm Partners, who said every major Texas city now has a mass-timber building on the ground or space available for lease:
“The appeal of mass-timber could shake up Texas cities weighed down by steel and concrete construction of 1980s-era.”
Steve Triolet, senior vice president of research and market forecasting for Partners on the new wave of timber buildings rising across Texas.
“Only time will tell if mass-timber is a driver of office leasing, but it doesn’t seem like there’s much downside risk to it,” Triolet told CoStar News. “From a political and environmental standpoint, it makes sense for new office buildings to use more environmentally friendly materials.”
Built over a concrete podium, Wood Central understands that the second to seventh floors of the building are constructed using Alabama Southern Yellow Pine (SYP) glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels supplied by Smartlam: “The first-floor podium and core, made of concrete with flat plate post-tension slabs and concrete shear walls, provide robust lateral support, illustrating an effective and resilient hybrid structural approach,” Smartlam reported.
One of thousands of mid-rise and high-rise timber buildings that are rising nationwide.
In 2024, Wood Central reported that more than 2,000 mid-rise and high-rise mass-timber buildings have been designed, are under construction, or have been constructed across the United States, with the number of buildings growing by 114% during the COVID years alone. And whilst mass timber only makes up 0.4% of the US softwood industry (or 0.362 million cubic metres) right now, it has the potential to grow to 9-15 million cubic metres per year and provide 9.9-16.5 million tonnes of “carbon benefit” fuelled by a wave of projects in the American South.
Toyota’s big move comes after Walmart moved into its ‘New Home’ – North America’s largest mass timber campus last month. Using more than 1.5 million cubic feet of timber, Walmart acquired a major stake in a mass-timber factory to bring its new Arkansas headquarters to life.
